Lately, I’ve
been going through my stuff, in preparation for moving. My past life is sifting
through my hands, and not only my own life, but the lives of parents and
grandparents and even great-grandparents. I see their pictures, their diaries,
their poetry, and the documents that mark important moments in their lives. Not
only that, but I’ve got fifty years of my own journals.
It’s a little overwhelming. Everything around me has been overturned, re-positioned,
spread out. And a lot of things have been thrown out. I threw out the workbooks
from the German class I took more than a decade ago, deciding that I’ll never
look at them again. I’m throwing out the Times Change reference books that I
used every time I erected a natal chart, before I bought a computer program to
do it for me, about twenty years ago. I’m tossing all the scrap paper that I’ve
been saving, even though it’s only written on on one side, because I just don’t
use that much paper any more.
While I’m at
it, I should toss away all negative beliefs about change, and embrace Octavia
Butler’s dictum, “The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”
August is a
month of change, because Uranus (planet of revolution) is conjunct the north
lunar node, a karmic point. What this means is that we’ve reached some kind of inflection
point. This conjunction happens about every fifteen years, and the last time it
happened in Taurus was in 1855. That was the time when pro- and anti-slavery forces
were battling it out in Kansas, and John Brown was active on the anti-slavery
side. Civil war was brewing. People were reeling from the impact of the
Fugitive Slave Law, and the Supreme Court was definitely not on the side of
justice. There were still bloody wars against indigenous Americans as well. In India, anti-British resentment was building,
and would erupt into a massive rebellion in a couple of years. The Crimean War broke
out too, with the Siege of Sevastopol echoing the current war in Ukraine.
So there were
tensions in 1855 which echo the tensions that we’re seeing today. Taurus is a
fixed earth sign, and conflict happens because everybody is attached to their
little piece of the earth, and to their religions and prejudices, and to the
patterns and habits that they’ve developed over the years. When there’s
pressure to change, there’s a struggle. It’s not easy; it takes work to look
realistically at what has changed, and what needs to change, and to move on
from there.
Currently in
the US, we’re dealing with some neo-fascist forces. They keep springing up, like
mold spots in a closed-up closet. Everything
has to be taken out, cleaned off, and given a lot of air and light. Fascism
only thrives in dank, oppressive conditions.
Mars is
currently in Taurus, and it’s like an activation switch to that north
node/Uranus conjunction. It sparks change, but because it’s in Taurus, the
change has to be deep and wide, in order to hold its own against the
resistance. But we’ve seen this in history many times. There’s progress,
backlash, and more progress. We don’t step into the future, we stagger there.
This will be
especially evident around August 4 to 10, when Mars squares Saturn, and we can
expect quite a lot of drag. But mostly this month is full of movement. About
halfway through August, Mars enters the zippy air sign Gemini, and so it
escapes the gravitational pull of Saturn. It will be there throughout the
winter. This is going to mean a lot more connecting, talking, thinking, reading,
writing, driving, and zooming. An online existence is perfectly adapted to Mars
in an air sign.
Air signs drift
around, and don’t tend to put down roots. But on August 22, the sun will enter
the earth sign Virgo, and that will help turn us back towards the earth, and to
all the tasks that need to be done when summer ends. For me, my roots are still
dangling in the air, as I whisk through papers, photos, books, and virtually
everything I own. But maybe by then, my wife and I will have a sense of our next
home. Maybe, instead of wiping dust off all these old possessions, I’ll be
sweeping into a new space.
