The Unhinged Party

Although it’s cold, it’s exhilarating to walk outside and feel that fierce wind blowing away one season and bringing on the next.  March is always an amazing month, since the return of spring never seems quite possible.  Those naked, barren trees are like a permanent feature of the landscape, but it won’t be long before it all comes to life. 

This month holds even more change than usual.  Not only are there two eclipses, but the outer planets are involved in a dance led by Jupiter.  There are indications of rebellion – Jupiter is inconjunct Uranus, the planet of change.  There are hints of deeper reform – Jupiter is trine Pluto, planet of long-term trends.  And there’s financial instability – Jupiter is square Saturn, planet of limitation.  All this in one month. 

With the surge of primaries and caucuses in March, it’s clear that stakes are being raised, bets are being placed, and winners and losers declared.  But I think that more is going on. 

My own feeling is that the Republican Party is in its death throes.  It’s becoming unhinged, dividing itself into two parties, at odds with each other.  If they do give Trump the nomination, then a big block of Republicans will split off, call themselves something different, and run their own candidate.  If they manage not to nominate him, he’ll start his own movement of renegade Republicans.  My sense is that there are people working out plans for both these eventualities, right now. 

It figures that the Republican Party would divide eventually.  It’s been the party of racists and millionaires, and what do these two constituencies have in common?  Not all that much.   The goal of uber-wealthy families is to hang on to their assets, and the goal of racists is to hold on to a perceived personal superiority, even when it doesn’t benefit them in any way. 

For the last fifty years, the super-wealthy have used racism and misogyny as tools, sometimes overtly and sometimes subtly, as ways to increase their own power and influence.  Anything that makes money for them is branded as good, and anything that distributes money more fairly  – unions, public education, welfare, women’s rights – is bad, or sometimes just terminally unhealthy, and is blamed on “those people”.  This has been the tactic that created the modern Republican party. 

But we live in something of a democracy, and so politicians have had to come out in favor of the things that ordinary (non-rich) people want.  This requires artfulness.  They have to say “small business” when they mean big corporations, “safety” when they’re talking about profit-driven prisons, and “national security” when they’re trying to boost weapons dealers.  

And now here comes a politician who has none of that artfulness, and who threatens to collapse the whole structure by being too obvious about it.  He blurts out racist and misogynist things instead of using the well-honed dog whistles that his party has refined over the decades.  Even though he’s a millionaire himself, he doesn’t seem to have learned the language very well.  He doesn’t have that millionaire sense of solidarity. 

So, like an iceberg in Antarctica, the Republican Party is going to calve.  That doesn’t mean we’ll be better off as a nation, although we could make some progress during the time it takes for it – or the new party -  to build itself up again.

And what about the eclipses of March?  The first one, a total solar eclipse on March 8, has Jupiter in Virgo facing off against the sun, moon, Mercury and Neptune in Pisces.  This mass of Pisces planets is like the solid dedication of true believers, who only need something or someone who will fulfill their fantasies of deliverance. 

This yearning to believe in something has a lot to do with Trump’s success.  He’s the “Great White Hope”, a figure who can rescue the flawed dreams that have been fed to white people in the US.  We’ve seen him in history before, and it doesn’t usually work out too well.  But this figure has been known to do a lot of damage before going down in flames.    

On the other side of the wheel is Jupiter in Virgo, which represents the principle of social organization.  With Jupiter in an earthy sign, this is a practical process, involving observation, good tools, and a certain amount of trial-and-error.  A static society is not a healthy one, and so Jupiter in Virgo represents change that’s both logical and ecological.  Ideally, everything grows organically and cooperatively.  Of course, for true believers, this is limiting and even boring.

Then on March 23, there’s a penumbral lunar eclipse.  It’s not quite as intense, but because the sun is in the fire sign Aries, there are conflicts that now move into the open.  This eclipse emphasizes the Aries/Libra axis, which is about independence vs. law.  Rebellious movements could gain a foothold. 

The Jupiter/Saturn square is very close, and so there could also be an economic downturn around the time of this eclipse.  This won’t necessarily last a long time, but it’s a good idea to be a bit more frugal in March, in preparation for this.  There could be a moment of reckoning when many people have to figure out what to do about long-term commitments.  Can we still afford to do the things we once planned? 

As a society, we may also have to look at long-term plans.  Saturn is in Sagittarius, the sign of travel, so problems with roads and bridges may become more evident, and perhaps very dangerous.  Funds will need to be diverted to deal with this, and where will these funds come from?  The millionaire class, and their pet politicians, will join together with an obvious answer:  let’s try again to get rid of health care. 

But Jupiter’s other aspects do point to change, so there will be a regrouping.  For many of us, spring is a chance to sketch out the world we’d like to live in.  If nature can reinvent herself, why can’t we?  For myself, I’d like to see a world with neither racists nor millionaires, but I think that will take more than one season. 

Stern Winter

January was bleak, in more ways than one.  Midway through the month, my family lost a brave, smart woman to an aggressive cancer.  Carol was gone way too soon; she wasn’t even sixty.  And not long after she died, the whole world turned white, and the snow pinned us in our houses. 

So in February, I am ready to learn whatever it is I’m supposed to learn from all this.  I want the snow to melt, making slow rivers on the sidewalks and the streets.  And I want wisdom to seep into my mind, bit by bit, so that I can make it through the rest of the winter, and whatever future winters come my way. 

Outside, as I write this, it’s warming, and I can hear the snow sliding off the roof.  On my desktop, there’s an 18^th century painting: a lady in pale blue silk, with a long nose and soft, mousy brown hair.  Her name was Elisabeth, and she looks calm and friendly as she sits for her portrait, as relaxed as anyone could be under such a large, diaphanous hat.

For the painter, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, all that mattered then was adding the right amount of green to the background, bringing out the pale tones of the portrait.  Neither of them knew that seven years later, Elisabeth – who was sister to the king – would be beheaded in the Reign of Terror, and Adelaide would be burning her canvasses of the royal family, in order to save herself.     

I look to Elisabeth for wisdom because her life and death are a closed circle, 222 years in the past.  Surely when we see the entirety of a life, we can parse its meaning.  Instead, I see a labyrinth of shifting fortunes, love and loyalty, fear and pride.  And then there are larger weather systems that alter the paths of hundreds of people, although each person falls as an individual.   

Astrologers study closed circles all the time, mapping out the flow of energy, correlating the shapes we see with other shapes from the past.  But we are always feeling our way, because life is an experiment that can never be replicated exactly.  And the messages we read are always slightly garbled, waiting for us to smooth them out and turn them into a reasonable probability. 

Sometimes I resist this process of reading the chart, of making it yield something practical.  It often gives useful information, but I always wonder what I’ve lost.  What richer messages am I ignoring?  What mysteries won’t yield to language?  

Once I went to a workshop that presented the planets as literal gods, and each birthchart showed the way we surrender to these gods. But most of us are not willing to surrender, to give up our sense of autonomy, even when we sense we’re surrounded by something looming and powerful.     

January called to mind those hard and demanding gods.  The month has been powerful, relentless, like an avalanche of snow scouring a mountainside.  And as we end the month, we’re stripped down to our bones. 

And this comes from Pluto, symbolic of the calloused hand of destiny.  It’s ironic that a dwarf planet shows up when we have this feeling of being swamped by oversized fates which we can’t control.  But January was very Pluto-driven.  First the sun conjuncted it, and then Mercury slowed down to a crawl, and stationed right next to Pluto.  As February begins, it’s still there, and when Mercury eases away in a few days, Venus will move in and take its place. 

How can one learn anything from these Pluto aspects?  You’re just trying to survive.  And yet this is when we learn things on the deepest level, in our bones and teeth and hair.   When we’re in survival mode, we’re trapped in a room with our wildest and hungriest selves, and no formula will turn these into docile pets.  But at some point, often years later, we honor the parts of ourselves that sacrificed everything, that became unrecognizable, in order to show us the way out of that room. 

About midway through February,  Pluto will stand alone once more.  There will be no planets conjuncting it, no henchmen to do its bidding.  The sun, Mercury and Venus will all have moved into Aquarius, and this is definitely a more hopeful and autonomous sign than Capricorn.  The focus will turn to friendship and community.  Suddenly, there will be more room to move around, to try something new. 

Aquarius allows objectivity, a certain distance between an experience and its meaning.  We don’t have to learn everything through the body, through the hard and barren earth, through the shovel and the rock. Knowledge will circulate more freely among people, and of course, there will be plenty of clashes of opinion in February, because people never agree on what’s true.  And the further you are from survival mode, the more truths there are. 

And then on February 19, the sun will enter Pisces for the last, dreamy month of winter.  This is the month when we all need our private escape routes, in order to imagine the green we’ve forgotten.  This is the month when people leave their bodies without a whisper, hoping that there are other worlds with flowers and soft breezes.  But this is also the time when we incubate whatever we want to be born in the spring.

For now, we’re buffeted by winter, and it’s all too real.  It may be too soon to say what we’ve learned.  All we can do is hunker down and study the face of time.  It’s the devil we know all too well, and the wisdom we always gain the hard way.    

A Look at 2016

After the glitz of Christmas, it’s hard to settle down into a winter and a new year.  The rituals connected with the holidays and the year’s turning have left me sensitized, sentimental, and also a little vulnerable.    

The first week of 2016 has gone by, and I’m sitting at my desk, staring out at the late-afternoon dusk, and thinking about the rest of the year.   So far, 2016 seems lean and still, like the grey and brown landscape out my window.  When I see a squirrel or a bird, I feel grateful for that dash of movement. 

It feels almost sacrilegious to be speaking out in this winter wrap of silence.  It seems to ask for quiet, for acceptance, for humility in the face of its inexorable rhythms.  What can I say about the year to come?

At about that moment, writer’s block came crashing down, and I opened facebook.  I went to my brother’s page to find out what is going on with him, and he’d posted something about political correctness, and I answered at length from a feminist perspective, and then someone posted a counterpoint to something I said from a transgender perspective and then I wrote a response, and then I thought, what the heck am I doing?, and erased it.  Clearly I do not have writer’s block if I can go on like this. 

So here I am again, on this page, trying to wrap my brain around 2016.   Yes, it looks like we’ll have many of the same old struggles this year.  Pluto is about halfway through Capricorn, and so I would say we’re about halfway through what the history books will call the Age of the Corporations.  They’ll describe this as the period between 2008 and 2023, when the wealth and power of corporations reached such extremes that a new form of feudalism was created, and then quite suddenly, the whole structure collapsed. 

Of course, neither the build-up of corporate power nor the collapse happen alone.  Corporate power will be  weakened by a great pack of termites, in the form of legal work, revolutionary movements, and political efforts.  Notice how I moved from the past tense to the present there.  That’s because we’re living it now, this year.  But it is useful to keep checking in with a historical perspective, and that’s the gift of astrology – to offer a larger sense of the cycles.  Of course, interpretation is always the product of one mind, firmly rooted in her own time.    

But 2016 is definitely a year of struggle.  The year begins with an angry aspect, the square of Mercury and Mars, as Mercury retrogrades.  This can bring up a lot of old blood feuds.  Then there’s the Uranus/Pluto square, which has been going on (off and on) since 2012, and it’s in orb during the first three months of this year.  It makes for more extremes, a stronger tendency to push and to resist.  So throughout this winter, there will be lines drawn in the sand, literally and figuratively.   We see this happening right now in Oregon, as a small right-wing attempt at a coup develops. 

The other hard aspect this year is the Saturn/Neptune square, and we already saw this in operation in November and December of 2015.  It manifested as a surge of fear, mainly directed towards refugees,.  It will be back in 2016 for a much longer time, between May and October, so we’ll be dealing with a period of continuing delusions and anxieties. 

Archetypically, you can see this Saturn/Neptune square in various ways.  One way would be the clash between the old people and the strangers.  Saturn represents the established structure of things, guarded by the old people.  Neptune represents the stranger:  anyone who seems odd, fey, peculiar, or disquieting.  Since I’m an old person and can easily disguise any tendency to be peculiar when I’m out in public, I do have to think about my own biases and assumptions.  I have to look at what I spend energy preserving.    

At the same time, Saturn is the planet of tradition, and the oldest of traditions can be especially valuable, having to do with respecting the earth and practical human experience.  Saturn can be about survival.  And Neptune can represent mesmerizing fantasies, dreams, and our tendency to lie to ourselves and to distract ourselves with glitter, lights and toys. 

Neptune can also be about the pull of religion, the tendency to make up dream figures and then insist that everybody bow before them.  Saturn can counter that with knowledge of the earth and its basic laws.  As global warming advances, Saturn could be a good defense, since it’s about paring back, cutting back on the waste of resources. 

At the same time, Neptune can be about spiritual awareness, the knowledge that there is way more going on than we can take in, with our limited senses.  And Saturn can be skeptical, even cynical.  Saturn is a planet of winter, and has a hard time recognizing that spring will eventually come. 

So in 2016 we’ll work on the interplay between what is established and what is strange, in many different ways.  The war between the secular approach and the dogma of religion will have many fronts.  People will come to terms with their fear of those who are different, and the gender continuum will become ever more apparent, and unsettling to some folks. 

At the same time, there need to be some touchstones, some caution, when it comes to diving into both seductive dreams and alienating hallucinations.  We need people who will say, “This isn’t real,” and then we need to talk seriously about whether what we’re seeing is just a stray dream floating into our collective consciousness, or the first dim shadow of a new paradigm.     

Lost on This Earth

Every day before lunch, I go for a short walk along the creek, down to the bridge.  Even on a cold, soggy day like today, I know it will be beautiful.  There are the bare branches all tangled against the sky, the muted orange and gold of the fallen leaves giving a crinkly texture to the ground, and the raindrops forming perfect concentric circles in the water.   

And I see a lot of squirrels, looking pretty fat and healthy, and busily ferrying nuts around.  They don’t seem unduly anxious about the coming winter.  They have a plan, the same one they’ve had in past years, and it hasn’t failed them yet. 

How are we humans doing?  Do we have a plan?  Today in Paris, leaders from all over the globe are meeting to discuss saving the planet for future generations.  This is a new thing, earthlings working together, attempting to use collective knowledge for the collective good on such a large scale.  But clearly we have to change our approach in a very basic way, partnering with the planet instead of competing against natural forces.

At this moment in history, most of us are a little lost.  We are passive, disconnected to our own power and agency.  Unlike the squirrels, we don’t have a clear connection between our day-to-day activities and the things we truly need to survive.  

We are all quite dependent on machines and technology which we don’t fully understand.  Many of us spend all day working at jobs which do not directly contribute to anyone’s well-being.  Some people create useful objects, but often do it in unhealthy, dehumanizing environments.    

And here in the US, a great deal of money and energy is dedicated to turning us into consumers, those who buy great quantities of stuff.  And as we buy things, we know that these objects are made cheaply, designed to fall apart as soon as possible, so that we will buy the same objects again.  In other words, even as consumers, we are not respected enough to be offered real value.   

All of this is bad for us and bad for the earth.  To survive on this planet, we’ll have to give up these mindless activities, along with all the garbage they produce.  It seems clear, looking around at the things the earth makes, that beauty and harmony are her choices in most situations.  If we learn to live in harmony with her, it will be because we echo her creativity, ingenuity, and style.       

Ambiguity, uncertainty and passivity relate to the planet Neptune.  And addiction is also a Neptunian thing.  When you don’t have a sense of power, you just reach for whatever feels the best, because it doesn’t much matter what you do.  When you’re not grounded on the earth or in your skin, then the best choice is to find an overpowering sensation and let it take you over.  And our society provides many choices of addiction, one to suit every personality.     

Right now, Neptune is strong in its home sign, Pisces, and it’s making a hard aspect to Saturn.  Saturn is the planet of limitation and scarcity, so this mix produces fear.  There’s an ongoing sense of threat, but no clear sense of its origins.  Our passivity feels wrong, but there’s still no clear signal for action.   

The attacks in Paris generated a lot of fear; they were felt as an electric shock here in the US.  Fear has been used as a cynical campaign tool for quite a while, but this approach has been escalating with the candidacy of Donald Trump, who is the master of social scapegoating.  Feel powerless?  It’s their fault, whoever “they” are.   And, in the twisted logic of a bully, these scapegoats are both capable of terrible things, and at the same time, weaklings and “losers”.    

This incendiary speechifying has resulted in a spate of domestic terrorism, such as the recent shootings at the Minneapolis Black Lives Matter rally, and the attacks on Planned Parenthood.  Fear makes people attack anyone who seems alien in any way, even if that person is an orphan child coming from a war zone. 

These issues will be with us for a while, although the Saturn/Neptune square will weaken as December goes on.  But this is just the first pass of an aspect which will be a big player in 2016.  It will return in the spring, and be in orb for about five months.  So we will have a lot of opportunities to work on this question of amorphous fear.  We will have to identify these terrifying figures in the mist, and that means coming closer to them.  It can mean stripping off their masks and seeing someone you thought you loved, or perhaps seeing yourself. 

During hard Neptune aspects, you have to find a way to move through the fog, towards whatever light you can spot.  The Paris talks are a beacon, although we still don’t know if they’ll succeed in any real sense.  Is the world too far gone?  Have we destroyed ourselves already? 

Neptune is not just the planet of confusion and ambivalence.  When we’re driven crazy by illusions and deceptions, we go inward, and so Neptune leads us to the still small voice of truth within.  This is our connection to the cosmos, which is both inside us and around us.  Neptune dissolves ego barriers, sometimes painfully, and puts us in touch with a greater consciousness. 

And Saturn is the voice of experience, telling us what hasn’t worked in the past.  Facing that can be flattening, but it’s a necessary first step to living more fully and wisely on this planet.  We can work together to build lives that are healthy, grounded, and accountable.  Some of us are doing this, without any sense of certainty, with just enough faith to keep on.  But some of us can’t find that, and are just howling in the wind. 

After This, I Promise, No More Political Predictions

A couple of nights ago, I watch the Republican debate in Boulder.   I haven’t watched any of their other debates, but my grandmother-in-law was curious.  And so my wife brought home a couple of six packs, and we all made a drinking game out of it.  Every time they said they’d cut out a major department or program – the Education Department, the IRS, etc – we drank.  Every time they mentioned Nazis, Communists, or Benghazi, we drank.  When anybody told a lie, we drank.  (We missed quite a few, though, as I found out later.)  

 I was drinking hard cider, Marisol was drinking beer, and my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law were drinking non-alcoholic beer.  We were all pretty tipsy by the end of the evening. 

And although I can’t form a real opinion until the Bad Lip Reading version comes out, it did make me start thinking.  It is very, very tempting for an astrologer to make predictions about the election based on the aspects at the time.  And I’m not that kind of astrologer, I don’t generally go around predicting things.  I talk about the options.  I describe all the different possibilities that each transit can bring, and the various ways you can make good use of the energy. 

No astrological transit is absolutely good or bad, and there’s no way to be specific about how it’s going to manifest.  Most events have many nuances, with rippling outcomes over time.  If an astrologer tells you you’re going to walk out of your house and get hit by a falling anvil, and it happens, then they’re very psychic.  Or they happen to know your upstairs neighbor is an Olympic medalist in the anvil toss.    

Still, I couldn’t help it.  I had to look.  And I have to say it looks pretty good for Hilary on Election Day 2016.  Uranus in Aries is trining her Saturn, and this is a transit that brings together the new and the old.  This could mean that her years of political experience will take her to a new beginning.  It  doesn’t look like an aspect that signals retirement. 

And there’s more.  Saturn in Sagittarius will be trining her Mars/Pluto conjunction, and this Mars/Pluto conjunction is what gives Hilary her stubbornness, her grit, and her ambition.  This doesn’t necessarily mean winning an election, but it does indicate that she is going to be really focused and strong around that time.  She’s not going to make a false move.

On Election Day, the asteroid Juno will be at the first degree of Sagittarius, the sign of vision and inspiration, and it will conjunct Hilary’s Jupiter.  This is a fitting aspect for the first female president.  Juno has been found to show up a lot in charts connected to social leadership and public service, and it’s important in Barack Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s charts as well.       

So then naturally, I’m wondering who her opponent is going to be.  At this point, it could be anybody.  None of the Republican candidates seem particularly viable to me, but that’s just my perspective as a middle-of-the-road lesbian feminist, somebody who doesn’t believe that guns are the most effective deterrent to government overreach.    

So let’s look at the Republican convention in Cleveland next July, and see what kind of aspects these folks will be fielding. 

First of all, there’s an element of surprise.  The moon/Pluto conjunction that introduces the convention indicates intense power-brokering, still going on as it starts, and during the event, there are hard aspects to Uranus (planet of change) from the sun, moon and Mars.  So they may do something daring, mainly nominate someone who doesn’t look like your mainstream white male candidate. 

Uranus in Aries will be squaring Trump’s Saturn, and that looks to me like a very large speed-bump. He’ll actually hit this around the middle of May, when it will occur to him that he’s spending a heck of a lot of money, and not having as much fun as he thought he would.  (Pluto will be squaring his Jupiter too, not good for finances.)  

I think Chris Christie will bow out in January, when Saturn squares his sun, when he’ll be dealing with issues around health or money.  John Kasich is also likely to take a reality pill and bow out early in the year, although he’ll have a good time at his party’s party in July.   Huckabee will have his groupies following him around at the convention, with Pluto sextiling his Saturn and inconjunct his Jupiter, but it’s not his time to rise. 

Things look pretty intense for Rand Paul, with Pluto conjuncting his sun.  Mainly, he’ll be going through an identity crisis of some kind.  Has he compromised his principles?  What are his principles?  Who is he?  This hits early in 2016, but he may try to ride it out.  If he makes a bargain with his devils, he’ll still be a contender at convention time.  But because the aspect comes back more strongly at that time, the stress could get to him, and he could start resorting to strong drink.

Rubio has some nice aspects going for him, although they’re not as dramatic.  But with Pluto opposing his Juno, I don’t think he’s getting the top spot.      

Jeb Bush is a lightning-rod, with Pluto opposing his Uranus and Uranus opposing his Neptune.  If he doesn’t make it to the end, it’s because he has that feeling of being a pawn in the game.  He’s already complained that it’s not the gentleman’s game that his dad and brother got to play.  My sense is that he will be passed over.  However, Saturn is trining his Venus, so he may end up being the compromise candidate, the one considered most solid, and he’ll be most appreciative.    

Ted Cruz’ aspects are actually pretty good at convention time.  Pluto is trining his Saturn/Juno conjunction, so it seems like he’ll be influential.  Neptune will be trining his Mars, giving momentum.  Pluto is also squaring his moon, and so he’ll get a lot of flak from a particular bloc of people – like women.  It could hurt his feelings, but it may not derail him.   

Things look fairly exciting for Carly Fiorina.  There will be several aspects to her Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto, some easy and some challenging, so she will also be a lightning rod at that time.  I think she has a chance to get on the ticket, probably as vice-president.   

Ben Carson has Saturn trining his Jupiter, so he could also be a compromise candidate.   The Republican voters could get behind the idea of a more tractable African-American, after Obama.  They could also calculate that it might get African-American voters to stay home.  Uranus stations right at the inconjunct of Carson’s sun in July, and this could throw him into the limelight.  However, there is a chance he’ll self-sabotage right around the time of the convention.

So, yeah, I think a Carson/Fiorina ticket is possible, and it would be a way for the Republicans to try to get back onto the moral high ground as far as diversity goes, without compromising their core value of shoring up corporate wealth.  And of course, I don’t think anybody is going to fall for that.  I hope.   

Well, now I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve made predictions.  I can never help myself. 

This coming month, there’s a Neptune/Saturn square in mutable signs.  Saturn is about what binds us, while Neptune is about our desire to be unbound, to connect with some beautiful, elusive cosmic goodness.  Neptune can be very escapist, and we all need to get away from reality at times.  But how far away do we get?

So November is a month of flux, of nervous energy, of sudden surges of faith and hope.  Just like all those Republican candidates, everyone has their little pet beliefs, often at odds with reality.  As the month goes on, these beliefs will become fuzzier, attracting the lint of allied convictions. 

At the Republican debate, we learned that if you say everything with confidence, categorically deny whatever is inconvenient,  and make abundant use of scapegoats (like the press), you can “win the debate”.   But can you win the people that easily?  Of course, these candidates don’t need to convince most of us.  They just need to make it all seem clownish, irrelevant, stressful or confusing enough so that most people won’t vote.  And that is what generally happens.  Most folks stay home, symbolically expressing their sense of exclusion from the corridors of power.   

Pluto will be in Capricorn for eight more years, and they will be lean ones, with a focus on maturity, responsibility and accountability.  These are the years in which we fulfill a promise to our descendants, by redesigning our social structure so that it can endure.  In November, our beliefs and illusions bump up against pragmatic realities, and we could sustain a few bruises.  But this is just the beginning.  We will have many, many occasions to separate truth from lies, during the coming years. 

    

      

The Truth of the Earth

I’m not an earthy person.  I’m watery.  But today, I’ve definitely spent too much time in the water;  I’ve been driving around doing errands in the rain all morning.  I’ve been hypnotized by the patter of the drops, the sweep of the wipers, the creeping traffic going from one fuzzy light to the next.  Hurricane Joaquin is apparently lashing this whole side of the country with its soggy low-pressure systems. 

And today I had to give up my sandals, and switch to shoes that actually covered my feet.  Just a week ago, I was in shorts, and now I’m wearing two sweatshirts and three pairs of socks.  I feel sad as I close all the windows, trapping the air until it’s time for the warmth to return.        

I’m not earthy, but I have to be realistic, to face facts.  And that’s what this month’s main aspect, Jupiter’s trine to Pluto, is all about.  With Jupiter moving through Virgo, sign of the carpenter, herbalist, greengrocer, and bee-keeper, there’s an emphasis on dealing with what’s really happening.  The weather is changing.  Quit your whining and handle it, I tell myself. 

Pluto has been in Capricorn for the last seven years, and its focus has been on dismantling, exposing, and rebuilding fundamental structures.  Often, this has been violent, met with powerful resistance.  With Jupiter trining Pluto, this work gets a little easier this month, and this is good for practical activists.  That is, it’s good for people who prefer real-life results to ideological victories. 

And when it comes to earth politics, it seems that we have reached a new level of consciousness.  New energy technologies are being developed and put into use all over the world.  They’re getting cheaper, they’re becoming easier to use, and the momentum is building.  With the scientists, the Pope, and the Democrats all sticking pins in it, the air is hissing out of the climate-change-denial balloon.

But is it just about technology?  New technology is like a rope reaching down to someone who’s hanging off a cliff.  First, you have to get the person back on solid ground.  But then you have to address the person’s tendency to fall over the edge every once in a while.  What’s going on here?

The problem is that we earthlings are still holding onto some basic belief systems which denigrate and disrespect the earth.  Look at these words:  earth, fertility, nature, woman, childbirth, passivity, receptivity, instinct, innocence, emotion, support.  And then look at these:  sky, intellect, man, activity, reason, aggression, dominance, war, leadership, confidence, experience. 

Of course, there are plenty of passive men, earthy men, intellectual women, and aggressive women.  But the male/female opposition, as it’s experienced today on much of this planet, is the wallpaper of all our lives.  We’re so familiar with it that we don’t see it.  And until we can unlink these concepts, we will continue despoiling the earth.

It seems clear to me that men need to become more like women.  I know that it terrifies them, because of the woman/victim connection which they themselves have propagated.  But until we women are seen – and see ourselves – as whole, the earth will also be seen as nothing but a backdrop for war and conquest.  We must respect the earth as our brother, our sister, all at once - active, reasonable, aggressive, fecund, nurturing, creative, knowledgeable.  The earth is all these things.

Jupiter in Virgo deals with the little things we can do, in the process of this healing work.  And every small shift in consciousness and in behavior helps.  Every time somebody refuses their customary label, and instead honors their more authentic self, it moves us towards a healthier way of living.  And there are lots of small actions that promote this, from a man washing the dishes, to a woman speaking her mind in a crowd. 

It’s not an entirely earthy month.  There is water as well, in Neptune in Pisces.  Virgo and Pisces are opposite signs on the zodiacal wheel, and the concrete practical approach of Virgo is opposed by the mysticism and emotional sensitivity of Pisces.  Neptune has been in Pisces now for about three years, and religious enthusiasm has become an ever-stronger force in our world. 

Neptune in Pisces represents the human ability to be hypnotized by our stories about ourselves.  These stories are often amazing, beautiful, and profound.  There is poetry in heartbreak, and many religious myths are powerful expressions of our most basic sorrows. But there is always a contrast between these elaborate tales, and the simple reality of a leaf, or a piece of wood, or a human hand. 

And right now, in this moment in history, there is an ongoing struggle.  The religious right is telling stories that are about the destruction of the earth, and meanwhile, is ignoring the very real physical changes that will leave us with less water, less land, and fewer resources.  Meanwhile, they see themselves as the victims of a war waged by scientists and atheists.

Religious expression is just going to get stronger while Neptune is in Pisces, and it will be here for the next ten years.   But the world is becoming a smaller place, as people move around more, and as they become change agents in different cultures.  And so we are all brushing against each other’s sacred stories, threatening the spells that we’re under. 

When you’re hypnotized by a story, there is only one story, and anyone who suggests differently is breaking you out of your trance.  It’s like being in a movie, and somebody jostles you, and you’re annoyed.  Neptune in Pisces is the film, and this month’s Virgo planets – Jupiter, Mars, and later Venus -  are the various jostling hands. 

“Hey, don’t you think it’s getting awfully hot in this movie-house!”

“Be quiet!  Look at the screen!  He’s just about to save us all!”

But there is a change happening this month too.  With Pluto trining Jupiter, reality will lend a hand.  Maybe it won’t be necessary for the whole movie-house to come crashing down in flames.  Maybe we can turn away from our fantasies, acknowledge the fear and need and terror that gave birth to them, and really look at each other.  And maybe then we can acknowledge that we really do live or die together, on this planet.  

The Turning Points of September

 September?  When did September get here?  Although summer is still here by the calendar, it feels like it’s driving away, leaning out the window, waving goodbye.  Off to the Southern hemisphere.

This month is the turning point of the year.  Right now, everything is still lush and green, with just a touch of yellow here and there.  But buried in every leaf is the imprint of its inevitable cycle, a cycle that exists in me as well.  Each of them will eventually make that spiraling journey to the ground. 

This is the time of year when we all hear a little voice in our heads saying, “Prepare.”  We know we must get ready for the leanness of winter.  I don’t have to chop and stockpile wood, or mash berries into jam, or turn over the fields.  I live in a world of central heating and well-stocked supermarket shelves.  But there’s still something in me that listens to that little voice, and that makes ready for change.  

This September is a turning point composed of several pivotal events.  For one thing, there are two eclipses, a solar eclipse on September 13 and a lunar on September 27, and eclipses always signal important new beginnings.  These are chances to throw off some outworn aspect of your life, and begin again.  The solar eclipse occurs in Virgo – where Jupiter is also positioned -  so it’s especially good for changes in health practices, work routines, and daily patterns. 

Virgo is the sign of practical work, of tools, of herbs and grains, and of service to the community.  For our ancestors, this was the time when we worked together to gather and dry and preserve the things that would keep us healthy through the winter.  We shared knowledge about healing techniques.  We made sure that everyone would have what they needed to survive the cold days.  It was a time of industry and efficiency.

This eclipse will bring many people back to an innate sense that things need to be done, and done well and thoroughly, before the season changes.  It will guide people away from the abstract and towards the immediate and practical.  And so it can mean working together towards specific, measurable goals.     

The challenge of Virgo is that it’s a sign of discrimination.  The ability to discriminate is vital to doing a good job;  you have to know what works and what doesn’t.  But old, deeply-held prejudices can give a limited sense of community, so that these Virgoan good works don’t go as far as they could. 

At this solar eclipse, the sun and moon are inconjunct the rebel planet Uranus, and so there’s some tension around the Virgoan tendency to control, define and limit.  Uranus is constantly pushing to open up the dialogue, to act upon a passionate desire for liberation.  But in this new chapter signaled by the eclipse, liberation requires a definite agenda, a set of tasks, a to-do list. 

We see this most clearly in the Black Lives Matter movement, where there’s been success in getting the basic message out, and directing attention to the problem of racist policing.  But continued momentum requires more specific goals, along with a structure that will support these.  That will be the next turning point.  Ecological activists, too, will focus more on tools and techniques, and on finding ways to make them fit seamlessly into ordinary people’s lives. 

When it comes to feminism, the movement has been pretty diffident in the last few decades. The focus has mainly been on health and work issues, rather than on larger, more inclusive messages.  The Virgo solar eclipse underlines this tendency, but it can also mean some significant gains in these areas.  The recent concentrated attack on Planned Parenthood can be fought from a widespread awareness of the practical, immediate value of the organization.  And the battle makes it clear that the right wing is trying to take away some of the tools that women use in our everyday lives.  

The Virgo solar eclipse supports a candidate like Bernie Sanders, who tends to be pretty specific and practical in his approach.  (He has the sun, Neptune, and north node in Virgo.)  When politicians speak in generalized sound-bites, they become much less relevant, and so I think the Virgo emphasis of September will narrow the field. 

On September 17, Jupiter and Neptune face off across the Virgo/Pisces axis.  This axis holds the tension between faith and reason. 

On one side, you have the mystical, transcendent Neptune in Pisces, and on the other, you have the community workhorse, Jupiter in Virgo.  The question that keeps emerging is:  what do you believe?  This question drives Jupiter in Virgo crazy.  For Virgo, if a system works, it’s good, and if it doesn’t, it’s not so good.  It’s not so important what you may believe.  But the right wing is living in a climate supported by a fervent set of beliefs.  And when it pins political stances to questions of faith, the right doesn’t have to make sense.  These beliefs don’t have to “work”.

The right wing largely mobilizes around a rejection of gay marriage and the right to abortion.  People weren’t going to get hot and bothered about tax issues and the rights of corporations, so the party core found something else to get people demonstrating, voting, and donating money.  Something that relates to deeper questions around sexuality and identity, and so feels a lot scarier to those who believe they’ve figured these things out. 

With September’s Jupiter/Neptune opposition, this faith vs. works question is going to be highlighted.  Of course, the best solution is for both sides to identify their areas of faith, as well as their commitment to particular areas of community work.  And this is happening, as social justice movements find religious allies.  Even the Pope has turned out to be an ally in certain struggles. And many right wing religious organizations do practical work in their communities, helping to feed the hungry, so there’s a point of connection there too.  

But when faith is connected to deeper fears, it’s more pointed, more feral.  As Mercury goes into its three-week retrograde phase, right after this Jupiter/Neptune opposition, we are all thrown back into the unfinished business of the past.  Old struggles are re-fought.  Old prejudices and assumptions have to be addressed and vanquished.  And because Mercury is in Libra, there will be some legal battles along the way, and some people will be held accountable.   

And at just about the same time, Saturn enters Sagittarius, the sign of inspiration, philosophy, global awareness and community activism, where it will spend the next two years.  Sagittarius gives an overview.  It hangs a banner high up in the room in which all the Virgo workhorses are doing their thing.  This banner is a call for adventure, a call to create a new future. 

Quite a few revolutionary figures were born with Saturn in Sagittarius, among them Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Maria Montessori, Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Eartha Kitt, Elie Wiesel, Cesar Chavez, Maya Angelou, Sidney Poitier, Che Guevara, Martina Navratilova, and Ellen Degeneres. 

This is not to say that everyone born with Saturn in Sagittarius has had a progressive agenda.  It gives passion for a cause, but not all causes are equally benevolent.  Everybody will be more zealous during the next couple of years, and so there will be some fiery clashes between different world-views. 

But one thing that Saturn in Sagittarius will do is remind us that it’s important to keep moving, to keep envisioning and creating a better world.  There will be times when we’re all trying to do this, while operating at cross-purposes, and there will be a lot of commotion without change.  But there will be other times in which inspiration runs through us.  Each person lights up, and in turn, passes this light to all the people they can reach.  And we can all reach a lot of people.