Jupiter ingressed Cancer with some fanfare earlier this week, and 12 hours later Mercury stationed retrograde, also in Cancer. Jupiter is a transpersonal planet; it represents many people and what happens to them. Cancer is a deeply personal zone of the wheel, and is one of the intersection points between the individual and the collective realms.
In the exact moments this astrology was developing, we experienced a series of public-sphere events all of which influence the most intimate matters of our lives.
In one of the last major events before Jupiter changed signs, Pres. Obama gave a rousing speech about why we need to take care of our planet and deal with global warming and its most wanted culprit, carbon pollution. He tried to bring the issue home to people by reminding them of their families.
"So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren. As a president, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act."
He also tried to illustrate the fact that the Earth is our home. "It was an image of Earth—beautiful; breathtaking; a glowing marble of blue oceans, and green forests, and brown mountains brushed with white clouds, rising over the surface of the Moon.
"And while the sight of our planet from space might seem routine today, imagine what it looked like to those of us seeing our home, our planet, for the first time. Imagine what it looked like to children like me. Even the astronauts were amazed. 'It makes you realize', Lovell would say, 'just what you have back there on Earth'."
What we have here is our home—which is noted in the term ecology, which in usage means environmentalism, but which on a deeper level is about understanding our home planet.
Wednesday night, Jupiter ingressed Cancer and Mercury was about to station retrograde. The news went from our front yard directly to the bedroom. Texas's state senate was busy trying to pass a law that would have closed most of the state's women's health clinics—yet another assault on women's reproductive rights and abortion, in an era where this is a defining issue.
This kind of proposal is a good example of how there is no private life that's not influenced by some larger public life.
Democrats filibustered the measure; an enthusiastic crowd in the senate chambers did its part to help delay the vote. Republicans tried to claim victory but were stopped when screen shots proving that the vote was actually at 12:03 am started circulating in the twittersphere, busting Republicans for trying to change the time stamp on official state documents.
Wednesday morning the personal was again political as the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). That was the law that defined marriage as between "one man and one woman," and which mandated that the federal government discriminate against same-sex couples who are legally married in their home state.
The court also struck down the appeals to a ruling that said that Proposition 8, a California voter initiative banning same-sex marriage, was illegal. This allowed same-sex marriage to resume in California and solidified its foundations in the 12 states, plus Washington DC, where it's legal.
I think that one of the most significant spiritual crises of our day is reaching for that ability to connect what happens to everyone and what happens to you. In the course of just 24 hours, as Jupiter ingressed Cancer and Mercury went retrograde there, we saw many examples of that personal connection—the question is whether we take them personally.
I cover these issues in the new edition of Planet Waves FM. If you're having a Cancer birthday, I've done a reading for you, which you may access here.
