Spelling Truth

As I write this, the justices are debating marriage equality.  And my people have a hero.  People are buying T-shirts that say, “Ruth Badass Ginsburg”, “You can’t handle the Ruth!”, and “You can’t spell truth without Ruth!”

It feels strange, though, that nine people I don’t know are debating the validity of my most intimate relationship.  Of course, in many ways it won’t affect us.  Marisol and I will wake up in the morning, tie our sneakers, post our facebook updates, make a few bad puns – not necessarily in that order – and begin our days.  After twenty-nine years, we are who we are, and together is one of the things we are.

What marriage does, though, is allow us to take care of each other a little better.  Each law that bends in our direction gives us a little more protection.  And the older we get, the more we appreciate that.   

So I’m sending some of my psychic energy towards the Supremes, thinking about the outcome.  Whatever happens, we’ll still be married here in Maryland.  But if they decide in our favor, my community as a whole becomes stronger, and all over this country, people wake up in the morning, tie their shoes, eat their granola, and find themselves a little more equal to the people who live next door. 

May looks slower than volatile April, partly because the sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars all make hard aspects to Saturn this month.  Saturn is in Sagittarius, a sign of justice and freedom, and so it will be the quest for these things that slows everything down. 

The Supremes’ decision about gay marriage is just part of that.  As I write, the city of Baltimore is reacting to the news that six police officers have been charged with manslaughter or assault, in the death of Freddie Gray.  This is not yet justice, but it is an honest quest for justice.  It’s more than most victims of police brutality have received.  And while the trial goes on, passions will flare, but everyone will wait.  The structure will hold.    

While we wait, however, everyone will be talking and writing.  There will be an ongoing war of words, with Mercury, then Mars, and finally the sun in Gemini.  Gemini is the most verbal sign in the zodiac, so people will be writing fiercely, talking constantly, spreading the information that seems most relevant to them.  With all these ideas and opinions circulating, we will all be exposed more often to other viewpoints, and that may open up a little more space between different communities.

We all know we’re right.  We all believe in certain things.  But the planets in Gemini will help us go beyond that, and deal with the actual information at hand.  On a smaller scale, that’s what will be happening in the courtrooms of May. 

But there will be some strain, no doubt about it.  We see this too from the inconjunct aspect from Jupiter in Leo and Pluto in Capricorn.  This is the conflict between the hero and the plutocrat.  Pluto in Capricorn represents bureaucracy, and the weight of old tradition, which masquerades as destiny.  It’s powerful, but not omnipotent, and is indeed always changing at a deep level.

However, Jupiter in Leo is not Everyone, not the ordinary human on the street.  Leo is the sign of royalty, of authority.  So we are looking at people who are superstars, who are confident enough to spit in the eye of the dragons of tradition.   Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Or Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney.

Are we happy to have heroes?  Just check out my mug that says, “The Ruth is out there.” Of course, our heroes are often there because we chose them, one way or another.  Bill Clinton wasn’t perfect, but he’s the one who put Ruth on the bench.  And the people of Baltimore voted for Marilyn Mosby.   

Of course, on the right too, there are plenty of people looking for superstar status, as they jockey for the ultimate coronation.  And so we might see some tension between Republicans and the plutocratic power structure, as well.  They will need to differentiate themselves, to become champions of actual people.  It will be interesting to see how that plays out, and whether a dramatic presentation – an assumption of kingship -  will fool enough of the people enough of the time. 

And then we also have a Mercury retrograde during the last third of May.  It begins on May 18, but even now, in the beginning of the month, Mercury is already slowing down.  Because it’s retrograding in busy, verbal Gemini, this won’t stem all the talk and writing.  But it could mean endless circling, byzantine complications, and it might delay results. 

And lots of information from the past could start surfacing, especially as May comes to an end.  Of course, the past has a million faces, a million stories, and everybody can find those that illustrate their own point of view. 

Michelle Bachman is calling for the Rapture, any day now, and if it happens, she’ll be the hero, leading her little band of Christians into the stars.  Nobody would object to this fantasy if she wasn’t mean about it.  She keeps saying the end-times are the fault of us gay people, plus Obama of course.  What I don’t understand is - why isn’t she thanking us for our part?   

But we do live in confusing times.  Saturn in Sagittarius is trying work out what freedom and justice mean, but it’s going to take some doing.  The words have been juggled and batted around so often that it won’t be easy to hold them still and really look at them.      

Electric April

I can hardly see the computer screen, because of the glare of the sun through the window.  But I don’t want to draw the curtain.  I need all this sunlight, to remind me that warmer weather lies ahead.  I need it, to set the crystals on my desk on fire and to cast rainbows on the wall behind me.  Sunlight is fuel, and for us here in the Northern Hemisphere, a little extra fuel can help a lot right now.   

One thing I’m grateful about, right at the moment, is that we’re coming to the end of the tense and combative Uranus/Pluto square.   This has been in orb – off and on, but mostly on – since June 2011.  It doesn’t officially end – given a 2° orb - until March of 2016, but the last exact aspect has just passed, and it will never be at peak strength again.  Now it just has to do some long, slow winding down.

But will it do it this month?  No, not really.  Even though it is generally becoming less powerful, it will be stimulated by the total lunar eclipse on April 4.  The sun will conjunct Uranus, and Pluto will square both the sun and moon, so many the issues of the Uranus/Pluto square will be revisited all month.  It’s as though we’re walking down a stormy road at night, and we have strokes of lightning to light our way.  We have to keep jumping out of the way, but we are also dazzled by sudden bolts of enlightenment.    

So what has this turbulent aspect brought us, through the last five years, and where are we now? 

Uranus, the planet of sudden new beginnings, is in the most hot-blooded and impulsive of signs, Aries, and so there’s been an increase in revolutionary acts, audacious rebellions, and military maneuvers.   Pluto in Capricorn holds an internal contradiction, since Pluto deals with deeper transformations and yet Capricorn is one of the most conservative signs in the zodiac.  So Pluto upholds Capricorn values, but at the same time, breaks them down in order to change them on a deeper level. 

How can you both uphold something and uproot it?  Actually, this is the way it always works.  Everything is changing – or you could say, evolving -  and when you give attention to something, you accelerate the process of change.  The deeper and more intrinsic the change, the longer it takes. 

Capricorn institutions are well-established, one might even say hoary.  Age gives respectability and authority.  There are structures in place which make those in power feel comfortable.  But everything breaks down in time, and all the Uranian threats to Capricorn institutions have accelerated that process. 

But as we can see, it hasn’t been just an either/or proposition, with the hot-heads on one side and the establishment on the other.  Sometimes it’s been that way. But we’ve also seen a hybrid spring up, with attributes both of Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn.  This is the conservative radical.   

Of course, this phenomenon is not new.  Ronald Reagan was one of the founding fathers of this approach.  But it’s really proliferated under the Uranus/Pluto square:  groups that claim a conservative mantel, an allegiance to tradition, and yet are intent on redrawing the contours of the world, with lots of blood and artillery. 

We see this in the Tea Party, which is rebelling against (mostly imagined) government oppression.  Since this is a democracy, albeit a very imperfect one, this rebellion has ended up in a number of Tea Party activists having positions in Congress.  That means if they do anything useful at all, they end up as the Government Oppressors, so they’ve been most forced to spend most of their time fuming, and trying to get rid of as many laws and regulations as possible. 

This has been pretty frustrating for them, and they could use more fresh air.  Hopefully they will be replaced soon, and they can spend their time practicing with their muskets, and telling tall tales of all the things they did in Congress.   

We also see this phenomenon in the Arab world.  Here we have people who have been fighting a battle over succession since the 7^th century, and are still very wedded to the authority conveyed then.  Here in the US, it’s hard to imagine traditions that old, or a sense of rightness that runs that deep.  Taking those centuries of religious commitment, and driving them out into the world with bombs and guns, is the focus of several groups of conservative radicals.

In the end, you do have to follow the money, and the power is not in the past, but very much alive in the present.  But these traditions are not just a pageant, but a real cry for some vanished authenticity.  At the same time, there’s a violent rejection of the modern world, and this negation of present-day realities is what makes these conservative radicals dangerous to other human beings, not to mention the planet.    

They can’t go back, but they can go backwards.  We’ve seen it happen before.  There’s always a Renaissance eventually, but it’s really a drag to have centuries of torture, plagues, and a lack of indoor plumbing before it comes around again.

But would all these shock troops exist, if established power wasn’t so deeply threatened, if it wasn’t breaking down?  I don’t think so.  Of course, many of these conservative radicals are well-funded by those firmly in power.  But I would say that the establishment has never really had control of them, and that’s why there’s so much fighting going on these days.  As I write this, the wars in the Arab world are shifting, growing, developing new branches, as oil-rich governments move to claim their authority over smaller militias.   

Coming back to the U.S., the Uranus/Pluto square has also brought some radical action on the progressive side.  There’s the Black Lives Matter movement, which carries the fifty-year-old mantel of the Civil Rights Movement, and so a claim to history.  At the same time, it’s all about the need to make sure that the Movement doesn’t get calcified into a powerless monument, but rather is recognized as an unfinished work.

And then there was Occupy, which raised a lot of important class issues on a global level.  The class structure underpins everything else, and so it will take a lot of work to have any progress at all in this area.  But the Occupy people began by raising consciousness, and this is always the first step. 

On the other hand, we in the gay and lesbian community have won enormous ground during this Uranus/Pluto square.  As a lesbian, one of my biggest challenges now is getting used to using the word “wife” instead of “partner” or “lover” to describe the woman who’s been at my side for almost thirty years.  I personally feel a much stronger sense of social support than I did five years ago.

Looking at the current situation in Indiana, I’m actually heartened.  There was a time when there would’ve been no response to a law pitting right-wing Christians against gay people.  And now there are a lot of people, all over the spectrum, in our corner.  For once, the homophobes are on the defensive. 

So a lot has changed during this period, and some momentum has been established in various areas.  But there are still quite a few live wires out there, and we’ll have to be careful not to step on them during April.  And there are some parts of the world which will see even more explosions. 

The upcoming total lunar eclipse, which sets a tone for the next six months, is in Aries/Libra, the zodiacal axis that has to do with relationships.  So although everyone’s needs are strong and immediate, we all need to learn more about negotiating.  This is our work:  to find a balance between our own urgent changes, and the rights and needs of others.  As we do this, we give our own lives more meaning, and we learn, step by step, what it is to be peaceful.   It may still be a while coming, but just like the buds of spring, it’s on the horizon.   

It's All About Me

Outside, people walk through the slush and the snow, but I am having visions of spring. I’m thinking about soft breezes, bare feet, and T-shirts.  I won’t have to spend hours chasing down my gloves, or putting on layer after layer just to go out and get the mail. 

Why did I ever let that beautiful warm earth go?  When it said goodbye, I should have grabbed it by the feet and held on like a crazy person!  But I look around, at the naked and icy trees, at the squirrels and birds who’ve survived or returned, and I realized I’m not the only one waiting out the winter.  And we could all get together, sign petitions, get an injunction from the Supreme Court, and it will still stay as long as it likes. 

Accepting the natural cycles of our world, and our human forms – that’s a tough lesson.   Humans can find lots of ingenious ways to react against the natural world, as well as ways to use everything it gives us.  But can we change it?   Even the moon, which seems so delicate as it flickers in the trees, is too much for us to move even an inch.   

This is a fiery month, and there’s going to be a lot of ego on display.  I’m experiencing that as I write this column.  My phone blips to tell me I’ve got a message, and I jump on it immediately and forget what I’m the middle of doing.  Because it’s about me.  Yay.  Somebody wants to talk to me!  I’m feeling all important, and then I have to go back to my work, which, today, is mainly writing this column.  Of course, now I’m writing about how I’m feeling important.     

So yeah, those lessons about our relative power in the universe, those are the ones we’ll keep returning to in March.  The month begins and ends with planets in all three of the fire signs.  Jupiter is in Leo, Saturn in Sagittarius, and there’s a changing array of planets in Aries throughout March.  Uranus and Mars stay there, while the sun and Venus spend part of the month in Aries. 

The fire signs are all about drama, excitement and heroism.  People are willing to stick their necks out, to shake things up, to take action.  Just looking at those with the sun in Aries, we see quite a few heroes.  Sometimes, moments of heroism are brief, and sometimes they’re the pattern of a lifetime. 

For example, we saw this at the Oscars last week, as Patricia Arquette gave an impassioned plea for women’s equality when she received her Best Actress award.  We find Aries sun leaders in many fields, past and present:  Nancy Pelosi in Congress, Dorothy Height in education, Gloria Steinem in journalism, Cesar Chavez in labor rights, Maya Angelou in cultural commentary and the arts.   Then there’s Aretha Franklin, who put her demand for respect out there in no uncertain terms in her signature song. 

And naturally, the hero and the villain are the same person, seen from different perspectives.  All those Aries sun people had enemies, because they dared to move into new ground.  I just picked up a derogatory post about Nancy Pelosi on my facebook feed a few days ago. 

And it’s also true that an Aries emphasis, or a lot of fiery signs, don’t guarantee that you’re going to be right, or make sense.  And in fact, in this fiery month, there can be plenty of wrong steps, since Uranus in Aries will be exactly squaring Pluto for the last time.  People can push against the limits because they’re angry, or because of hurt pride, or just because they’re bored on a Saturday night.  And this kind of impulsive action is most likely to go wrong, because it’s not grounded in deep thought or community support. 

Everyone has been horrified by the beheadings conducted by the Islamic state, but the head is ruled by Aries, and beheadings send a strong message about taking independent action.  Maximilien Robespierre, the main figure directing the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in France, had a fiery chart with the moon and Venus in Aries. 

This is not to say you’re going to be beheaded as soon as you express the fiery side of your nature, or as soon as you take a risk.  But when your ego is hurt, it can feel like a symbolic beheading.  You thought you were all that, and then you aren’t.  You can’t move the moon.   

So do think about what you’re doing.  Flash and fire are exciting, but long-range strategic planning requires some earthy influences.  For most of March, the only earthy influence is Pluto in Capricorn, and it represents the firm structure of established interests.  It doesn’t support the impetuous, rebellious urges of Aries, but rather suppresses and sometimes punishes them.  But then on March 17, Venus enters Taurus, and this has a grounding effect for all of us. 

More, it reminds us all of what we’re fighting for.  We’re fighting to live the delightful, sensual, satisfying lives we want, on this lush planet.  And about the same time, here in the Northern hemisphere, we’ll start to experience the abundance of the earth.  Suddenly, beautiful things will be bursting forth, everywhere we look.  Spring will return, like a lover we’ve craved and missed.

But we can’t always be patient, and wait for the natural cycle to come around, can we? Sometimes we have to walk out into that lonely spotlight, say who we are, and claim our birthright.  We may not be able to lay our hands on the moon, but we can etch a definite message into human consciousness.  Every human who hears us resonates to the bare bones of the message, the courage and dignity of a human proclaiming her truth. 

And yet it’s not really about who hears us.  It’s more about who we can become.  And this where the earth is on our side.  We can’t become a tree, or a bird, or a kangaroo.  We are locked into these bodies, and this physical world, into time and space.  But we are not static.  We grow, like the weeds and the flowers and the grasses.  We unfurl.  Self-aware, unique, we create new selves every moment.  For now, we burn.  

The Halfway Point

It’s halfway through the winter, a day that’s celebrated in many different ways.  It’s Groundhog Day,  Imbolc, and my mother-in-law’s birthday.  Back in the day, when I was a witch in a coven, we celebrated it as Candlemas, and it was the time that we initiated new members.  All these different celebrations are mixed in my memory, imparting a unique flavor to this windy afternoon.       

Mercury is retrograde, and that always brings on feelings of nostalgia.  We hear echoes from the past.  Old habits are resurrected, old patterns of thought resurface.  I recently read a blog about “political correctness” making a comeback, and it reminded me both of the radical movements of thirty years ago, and of the backlash to that radicalism. 

Mercury goes direct on February 11, but it spends the rest of the month in what’s known as the shadow period.  It moves slowly, reclaiming lost ground, until it reaches the point where it went retrograde, on March 3.  So February’s tone is generally thoughtful, a time to remember and to process. 

This Mercury retrograde gives us a chance to really look at the words and phrases we use, to check out the emotional charge that each one carries.  We are lucky to live at a historic moment in which communication is burgeoning.  In some ways, it’s an echo of the period when the printing press was first developed, and when cities were suddenly full of pamphlets and tracts.  

Mercury is in the reasonable, logical sign Aquarius all month, and this encourages dialogue, inquiry and education.  People talk about unconscious bias, economic principles, gender politics, the biosphere, and everything else.  And then there’s Black History month, always a great time to share lost stories, and to look at the sources of current tensions in past events. 

People weigh in on social issues, and respond to others who see things differently.  We’re still sharing all the experiences curated by influential people  – the movies, the TV, the political drama – but now we’re also connecting around more spontaneous and ordinary experiences.   

This can make people uncomfortable, given that we have been trained to passivity for many years, as audiences and consumers.  How does it feel when a fellow audience member stands up and starts singing an aria?  Our first impulse is to hush them.  After all, we’re not here for that.  Or are we?  Maybe, as Jane Wagner said, the play is the soup, and the audience is art. 

As we turn our heads to see what’s happening beside us, rather than staring ahead at the screen, we see so much more.  All the communication builds energy, and turns into organizing.  We see this in the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City and around the nation.  These protests interrupt the flow of ordinary life, just as routine racism disrupts the lives of Black people.  They get people involved, thinking about issues that may have seemed distant in the past.    

Mercury’s retrograde in Aquarius also lends itself to fixing things, and we see this in the budget that President Obama sent to Congress today, with its focus on shoring up the country’s infrastructure.  His budget also reverses the sequester, recognizing that it was a lousy idea to begin with.  This is how Mercury retrograde is supposed to be used.  It’s about repairing things that are broken, and making changes to things that never worked well. 

Underneath this month’s reasonable Mercury-in-Aquarius veneer, though, there are some storms.  Uranus and Pluto are still at odds, moving towards their last exact square in mid-March.  So there’s tension building, as different factions jockey more and more intensely for position. 

There are strong fiery and watery influences all through the month, and that puts the Aquarian sun and Mercury at a distinct disadvantage.  The watery planets are all in Pisces, the most sensitive and intuitive of signs, and these make for a more subjective and vulnerable approach.  Among the Pisces figures are the martyr, the saint, and the poet;  these are people who are generally not open to discussion.  And the sun itself leaves Aquarius and enters Pisces on February 18, just after the new moon.

On February 19, the first day of the new lunar cycle, there are five planets in Pisces, so emotion is at a high pitch.  It’s like the sound of the mermaids singing.  You may not understand what they’re saying, but you know how they make you feel.  And for the rest of the month, we’ll all be going from feeling to feeling, while Mercury in Aquarius tries to explain us to each other.   

During the last part of February, the urge to believe will be stronger than ever, and the connection with reality could become a lot more tenuous.  People will reach for their religious and spiritual shelters, but for some people there’s an ongoing need to defend these shelters against those who think or act differently. 

This, coupled with the stressful power issues associated with the Uranus/Pluto square, could mean violence.  And there are the fiery influences – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and the south node all in fire signs.  So passions could flare, and old anger could be forged into new weapons, especially among people who believe strongly in the hero myth. 

And that means us here, in the US.  Uranus and Pluto will form a T-square with the sun in the US’s chart, so important questions about our national identity will come up.  It’s a turning point for us.  What do we believe in?  Can we pursue a reasoned approach?  What do we do about our most vulnerable citizens – and can we even agree on who they are?  Why are advocates for fetuses on one side, and advocates for small children on the other side?  And how do we really make change, as opposed to putting new actors in the same old roles?   

But yes, it is a time of change, irresistible change.  And along with the changes, there will be a powerful flow of emotion.  The poets, saints and martyrs will all give their particular spin on it, running across the pages of the history books yet to be written. 

2015: Fire Year

The new moon at the winter solstice was pretty serious, with its five-planet stellium in Capricorn, and since then, it seems like everybody’s been getting sick.  Like dominos falling.  My wife, me, my wife again, my son, my daughter-in-law, lots of friends, friends of friends.  My healer – a woman who lives in Georgia and has been my healer for decades - ended up in the hospital when her gallbladder suddenly gave out.

So it seems like many people have been dealing with a narrow and somewhat uncomfortable reality lately.  For me, there’s also been a undercurrent of sadness, since it’s the first holiday season without my dad, who died in September.  His absence has leached a certain jollity from the season. 

But head colds and family losses are the stuff of ordinary life, I know.  And maybe that’s what’s been hard about this season, this ongoing sense of being an ordinary mortal, during this season of glitter and lights.  A death in the family always calls attention to the swinging door of mortality, and a bad cold can make you feel like a zombie anyway. 

So the Capricorn stellium at the new moon flattened many of us, true, but maybe we all need flattening occasionally.  Maybe I needed to come down to the basics, the ache of blood and bone, as a sort of end-of-year cleansing of all pretensions, delusions and manias.   During this last week, I’ve focused on what’s important and ignored everything frivolous, and so I’m feeling quiet, hollow, and meditative.   

It’s the quiescent time, the hinge of the year.  Night falls early, and when I go outside, the grass is starched with frost.   Everything is waiting until it’s time to grow again.   I’m waiting too.

But things are changing, although it’s hard to believe from this dry, earthy Capricorn vantage point.  But by next week, Mercury and Venus will be in the mentally active sign Aquarius.  The next lunar cycle (beginning on January 20) will be exciting, electric and engaging, with four planets in Aquarius.   The one after that (beginning on February 18) is also very Aquarian.  And the following lunar cycle, at the vernal equinox, has some shape-shifting energy which will keep everybody wondering, and turning with questions to their spirit guides. 

And so things may wake up long before the winter gives way to spring.  And 2015 will not be an earthy year, but rather a fiery one.  With three outer planets in fire signs, there’ll be some definite progress.  People won’t be afraid to express themselves, to be creative,  to demand their rights, and to move towards a larger vision of the world.  After this slow beginning, it will be a year of pulse and flow.     

So what are these fiery influences that we’ll see in 2015? 

There’s Uranus still in Aries, where it’s been for the last three and a half years.  During this time, the warrior ethos has been very strong, with large numbers of young people enlisting in armies and militias.  Uranus in Aries is rebellious, headstrong, independent, and it can give an automatic rejection of authority.  The gift it gives is the sense that a single person, on her own, can do anything.  A single person, brave and passionate enough, changes the world.    

Then there’s Jupiter in Leo, where it’s been for the last four months.  Leo is the flashiest and most flamboyant sign in the zodiac, and Jupiter here can increase a social tendency to conspicuous consumption.  It’s the sign of kingship, and we see plenty of evidence of royalty/serf relationships in our society.  But the gift that Jupiter in Leo gives is enormous creative self-confidence, and a great generosity in sharing one’s talents with the world. 

Then there’s Saturn in Sagittarius.  This is the new kid on the block, since Saturn only entered Sagittarius a week ago.  Of the three fire signs, Sagittarius is the one that’s most philosophical and community-oriented.  Its shadow side is fanaticism, a hunger for larger meaning that can ignore anything mundane, practical or logical.  But the gift that Saturn in Sagittarius can give is a constantly expanding understanding of the world we live in. 

With these three outer planets in fire signs, 2015 won’t be a stagnant year.  Pluto will stay in the pragmatic earth sign Capricorn all year, and its role will be to suppress, repress, cool, and formalize all this fiery energy, especially during the first half of the year.  But as it stamps out one fire, another one is likely to flare up.   

You would think the summer would be the hottest time, but no.  In fact, it’s the least fiery time in the coming year.  In August of 2015, the energy becomes more grounded, as Jupiter leaves Leo and moves into the earth sign Virgo.  Jupiter in Virgo will bring an upsurge of enthusiasm in everything connected to the body, health, exercise, diet, gardening, herbs, wildlife, forestry, and ecology.   In the summer, Saturn will also slip back into Scorpio for a few months, undercutting some of that fiery energy and indicating a slower and more meditative pace. 

In late September, Saturn is back in Sagittarius, but the most active and vehement period of 2015 is past.  Jupiter in Virgo makes a harmonious connection to Pluto in Capricorn – a handshake across earth signs – and this helps with lots of practical long-term projects.  This is when some of those big corporations will suddenly dedicate themselves to improving people’s lives by starting community gardens and cleaning up toxic dumps.  Of course, Uranus is still in Aries, so there will still be a lot of rebels out there, taking note whenever the corporate model interferes with individual rights. 

But the corporate model has a ways to go.  I’ll say another decade.  When Pluto moves into Aquarius in 2025, I think there’ll be more interesting things happening outside boardrooms than inside them, and eventually nobody will be willing to do this kind of boring, stressful work. 

Right now, the system depends on an interweaving of security, responsibility and status.  But give it another decade, and that will unravel.  There’ll come a time when security means group affiliations, responsibility means awareness of the greater social good, and status means creative freedom.  We can already see this happening.  Who does everyone envy?  The creative genius who does what excites her, who has the respect and appreciation of everyone around her.  She has status that could never be given by a fancy watch.   

So it will happen.  Walls fall and spaces open up, and the new walls create different kinds of rooms.  But I’m not seeing it happen this year, at least not on a large scale.  There’s a lot of pounding against the walls of the corporate world, but don’t expect to see them fall quite yet.  But in this meditative season, I can look across a vast expansive of time, and see it happen.  

Progress

November tends to be a little dim and dank, but as the month comes to an end, we remember to be grateful for the abundance we have.  And then December brings all those twinkly little lights, more and more as the month goes on.

In December, Saturn leaves dank, brooding Scorpio and enters the lively fire sign Sagittarius (for the next two and a half years).  Saturn, as the planet of limitation and restriction, is never exactly perky, but in Sagittarius, there’s a stronger sense of possibilities.  Sagittarius is about adventure, excitement, passion, and wider horizons. 

Sagittarius brings a broader and more philosophical way of seeing the world, so it lends itself to community progress.  Saturn was in Sagittarius in 1957, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and when President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas to protect the Little Rock Nine.   It was in Sagittarius when the peace symbol was inaugurated by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.   It was there when the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union, was founded. 

Sagittarius is also a sign of travel.  Saturn was also in Sagittarius when Jack Kerouac published “On the Road”, Edmund Hillary went to the South Pole, Sputnik was launched, and the Boeing 707 flew for the first time.  Who knows where Saturn in Sagittarius will take us?  Already the rights of immigrants are in the spotlight, and as the newest wave of immigrants become more established, the country will grow in innovation, creativity, and perspective. 

This November, we’ve seen continual lessons around the racial divide in the US, and these have to do with Saturn in Scorpio’s tendency to dredge up deeply-rooted feelings.  But the future of these movements is more hopeful, thanks to Saturn’s entrance into Sagittarius in December.

The movement in Ferguson was fueled by immediate outrage but it is taking a long-term perspective.  There has been no obvious victory, since the frightened policeman who killed Michael Brown was not indicted.  But that was not really a surprise.  And victory is not always obvious.     

Real change comes more incrementally and invisibly, often in actions not taken.  Real change is the gun that doesn’t fire, the camera that records a response that once went undetected,  the policeman who learns about unconscious racism.  The Ferguson struggle is just another chapter in a much larger struggle linking all of us here, one which brings up some intrinsic questions about our morality as a nation.

Real change comes slowly, and often invisibly, but it’s still a question of seeing what we haven’t seen before.  That’s always the first and most painful step.  The Saturn-in-Scorpio step was seeing the truth, framed in stark terms of life and death, and the Saturn-in-Sagittarius step will be incorporating what we’ve learned into a new social philosophy. 

And so white people in the U.S. have seen some new truths.  They’ve thought about what it’s like for the parents of an African-American teenage boy, walking down the street in any American city.  First they saw it with Trayvon Martin, and then with Michael Brown.  It might’ve been easy to disown Zimmerman’s actions, to see him as an overzealous anomaly.  It’s not so easy to disown a policeman, paid by the government to do its work, protected by the government in the end. 

There could be quite a few confrontations in December, and confrontation can bring even more clarity.  This month, we experience the sixth exact pass of the revolutionary aspect that began in 2011:  the Uranus/Pluto square. 

There is an eager lunging towards change these days.  We can taste our desire for it.  People are imagining change, creating a wide spectrum of new scenarios that match their fantasies.  I’m doing it too, and in my world, there’s peer pressure but no coercion, anger but little violence, and sadness but rarely desolation.  But there are other visions, a multitude of them, some very much at odds with mine. 

As I get older, I think:  small steps are okay, as long as they’re in the right direction.  But the Uranus/Pluto square is not about small steps. It’s lightning-abrupt, powerful, and definite. 

Uranus and Pluto are both about change.  Uranus is about novelty, innovation, vibration, electricity, radical social movements, and scientific progress.  It’s represented on our screens these days as a huge robotic, armor-clad hero, supported by up-to-the-minute technology. 

Science is in a combative pose these days, but still, there are no angry Luddites in the streets.  Nobody is suggesting that we do away with technology, even the conservatives who think the Bible is the last word on everything, and that the earth was created 6000 years ago, and that we never actually went to the moon.  They still want their own tools -  their cars and computers and factory equipment -   to be modern and efficient.  They haven’t become Amish.  So it’s not that science is being wiped out, but that people keep trying to shackle it – as they’ve done so often through the centuries, often in the name of the church.    

So enter Uranus in Aries.  It’s science fighting to be free.  It’s truth, burning for liberty.  And it has its hero myth, since scientists know they have an important role in rescuing the earth from the upcoming crisis.  Science has sullied air and water, but science can save them.  The danger is that science can identify too much with its hero mythos, seeing itself as Superman instead of fallible and human.    

And what is this high-tech robot fighting?  On the other side of the ring, there’s Pluto in Capricorn.  Pluto is slow, buried power, and it’s much harder to show on the movie screens.  It’s the Shadow.  It’s the black-and-white mystery film with its twitching suspense.  And it’s in Capricorn, the sign of structure, tradition and formality, where it’s especially cold.  Think old stone walls.  Think crystal skyscrapers going up to the sky.  Think the quiet, intricate hierarchies of corporate finance.  

Pluto moves slowly, more slowly than any other planet, and yet it has to do with major transformation.  That’s because the power of transformation is underneath everything.  Everything falls. 

So Uranus wants the structure to fall immediately, right now, and Pluto is basically telling it, “Wait, child.  It will all be gone, and there will be something else in its place.”  Who knows what that will be?  Pluto will be Capricorn for nine more years, and in that time, we could all become vassals of the Chinese.  Maybe we should be paying a lot more attention to the struggle that’s going on in Hong Kong. 

What is our path to wisdom in all this?  We have the momentum, when it comes to Uranus in Aries.  But we need to channel our anger, our urge for freedom, and our scientific know-how.  To me, that says that enlightenment should be our goal.  We need to enlighten ourselves and each other, to be willing to see what we haven’t seen before. 

And when it comes to Pluto in Capricorn, it’s also about listening.  There is some rumbling deep, deep underground.  We may not be standing on this earth anymore when it reaches the surface.  But we may.  And if we are here, it may be there’s no technique or tool that will save us.  But there may be.  And it may be that today’s freedom fighters are the ones honing the tools, teaching people to understand what’s all around us.    

Masks, Life and Death

It’s Halloween, the time when the membrane between the worlds is especially thin, when we honor our ancestors and appreciate all they’ve given us.  About seven weeks ago, I lost my dad, and so when I think of the spirit world today, I think of him.  I’m grateful not just for the life he gave me, but for the lessons he taught me.  And when I open the box of photographs he left me, all these other ancestors crowd out, and each life has a message for me.    

There’s something very essential about this time of the year.  People masquerade, as if they know that these personalities we adopt, these roles we play, are just costumes of the moment.  We’re all elemental forces, walking for a time in this world.  We have just enough time to draw a few strokes in its pattern, but not enough time to look at it and see how it all fits together.  That’s something our descendants do for us, after we’re gone. 

It makes sense that this time comes a month after the balancing act of the fall equinox.  At that time, we measure the dark and the light and see that they’re equal.  At this time, we measure life and death, and see that they are also two sides of the same coin. 

Yes, I’m writing this on Halloween, but the whole of the month has this intensity, this essentialist flavor.  The lightest moments in November are actually the first days of the month, when Mercury sextiles Jupiter, and everybody gets that playful vibe.  After this, the energy intensifies, becomes deeper and more introspective.

This is Saturn’s last month in Scorpio.  Archetypically, Saturn is the Crone, the Old Wise One, the Teacher.  Scorpio is the sign of secrets, death, and transformation.  Saturn has been in Scorpio for two and a half years, and many of her lessons have been about death.  It’s been a time when a grim  virus has decimated a continent, and when religious fervor has stepped up its hopeless love affair with the AK-47.

During this last month, Saturn will have visitors, as the sun, Mercury and Venus are all going through Scorpio, and each in turn will conjunct Saturn.  It’s as if each one goes up to the Crone and asks her for a deeper wisdom.  Venus, the goddess of love, conjoins Saturn on November 12, and love becomes heavier, sadder, and more serious.  The sun joins Saturn on November 18, and brings up questions about authority and identity.  And Mercury conjuncts Saturn on November 25, with questions about how to think, and how to learn what we need to know. 

Mars, the planet of action, makes its own pilgrimage this month.  It’s in Capricorn, the sign ruled by Saturn, and it conjuncts Pluto, the planet that rules Scorpio, on November 10.  And so Mars pauses too, and accepts its lesson from the Old Wise One.  Its preference is for the thrill of spontaneous action, but now it has to become accountable, to see the underlying consequences of action. 

And so it’s a sobering month, punctuated by these Saturn moments.  The energy of Saturn is conservative, and its wisdom tends to be responsible, pragmatic and grounding.  It focuses on preserving rather than changing, on the known rather than the possible, and on a realistic assessment of existing resources. 

It seems like this would lend itself to a healthier and more ecologically sound way of living on the earth.  But it’s not easy to move from a society that’s based on elitist and expansive principles to one that is truly conservative.  A truly conservative system would conserve trees, land, air, and water, and would be friendlier to families.  It wouldn’t deport fathers, for example, forcing them to leave their children.  A truly conservative system would encourage people to grow food, and to learn how to fix things, rather than urging them to consume more and more. 

So I do think we could take back the word “conservative”  any day now.    

The Saturnine lessons of the month will tell us where we are going wrong, where we are deviating from an earth-friendly, sustainable way of living.  Because Saturn is in Scorpio, the lessons will be intense, deep, and shadowy.  We’ll peer into those shadows and catch glimpses of all the things we usually refuse to see. 

I do think people are waking up to the contradictions inherent in the world we live in.  But when we come back to reality, we can only come back so far.  None of us is ready to see the world as it really is.  And so people come up with scapegoats, invent enemies, and imagine them with more power than they truly possess. And then they get snagged there, and their way of being conservative involves resisting these outside forces, one way or another. 

And yet all these villains we see, they’re usually about as dangerous as the masked children that will run through the neighborhood tonight.  When tomorrow’s dawn breaks, we’ll ask ourselves, Where did they go?  Someday people will ask the same question about us.  And they’ll also look to see what we left behind.