Many people are wondering what just happened over the past six months. What, exactly, you went through, what it meant. and where it’s left you. You may be wondering how, with every passing day, life seems to be more intense, less certain, and a few shades more dangerous. This is a good time to reassess. Mercury is retrograde through September 12, and one of the most natural uses for that particular condition is to review—particularly when Mercury is in Virgo.
Yet the Libra equinox is also about to arrive, which is a turning point in the year—a moment to gather energy, release the old season, and move forward. So, first let’s review, and then let’s consider the equinox chart.
I think we’re all noticing the level of insanity in the world, the sense of pressure, and, perhaps most challenging, not knowing how far from the edge we really are as we sprint along that edge or toward it, into the future or the abyss or whatever it is. All summer long, a planetary alignment has come in and out of focus (currently, it’s taking a little breather). This is a grand cross on the four cardinal points—those four anchors into physical reality that connect individuals with the collective and bring collective experiences into our living rooms. These are Jupiter and Uranus dancing back and forth between Pisces and Aries; the lunar South Node (and therefore) eclipses in Cancer; Saturn shifting between Virgo and Libra (now in Libra till October 2012); and Pluto solidly in early Capricorn, along with the lunar North Node (and eclipses).
The four signs I mentioned—Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn—are the cardinal signs. They have one thing in common, which is when the Sun enters one of them, a season changes. They have another thing in common, which is that when any other planets are gathered there, existence takes on a larger-than-life, at times overwhelming, sensation.
Slow-moving planets are orchestrated such that we keep shifting into energy surges that flare up and then settle down, only to bubble up again. The slow-moving bodies in the arrangement (the ones I just named) keep realigning in new ways, which is in part responsible for the ebb-and-flow effect. Then, fast-moving bodies (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury) jump into the fray for a little while and the feelings both reach a new level of intensity and are all the more personal and emotional.
Our lives have been reflecting this process in our assortment of minicrises, larger- than-minicrises, turning points, moments of despair, and incidents of progress, all in a condensed sequence of events. Through the summer months it’s seemed that more than the usual number of people were close to melting down, and we’re all flirting with the sense of things running out of control. There are days when it feels like we live through everything all at once. Various metaphors for amusement park rides that you can’t quite get off of keep coming to mind, and it’s always a relief to eat a meal that’s neither cotton candy nor friend dough (they still exist, but you have to go searching).
For those who dare to watch cable news without doubling up on their anxiety meds, clearly the insanity is as bad as it gets—and then it gets worse. It may be that paranoia is easy to manufacture and inner peace cannot be made artificially. Scared people getting together is still a news story, and calm, focused people sharing ideas is a nonevent.
There are legitimately troubling questions, such as, How can anyone possibly take Sarah Palin seriously? Will she beat Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential debates because she’s less intelligent and therefore more appealing? And then what?
We live in an age of continuous buildup without release, of endless preparation without the main event. This is partly why 9/11 was so cathartic—it really had that feeling of something actually important happening and we all latched on to it. It’s also why end-of-the-world scenarios associated with 2012 are so entertaining: More than we fear that something important will happen, we hope that it will happen and therefore resolve this tension that we’re living with.
And I admit, it’s a particularly challenging form of tension. We desperately want to oppose evil, but it has no identity, and then we discover that we’re caught in the devil’s bargain. An oil well gushes out of control into the Gulf of Mexico for three months as we watch helplessly on television day after day. That got a good few people to think about how much plastic we use, but even if you literally work at it fulltime it’s impossible to remove plastic from your life.
Watching day after day, we had this image of a huge pipe on the sea floor, thick as an oil barrel, then it turns out to be the diameter of a dinner plate. BP tries to cap it five times (dome, golf balls, another dome), then one day they just stick a cap on it and that’s that. Three months to design a bottle cap? It was supposedly the worst oil spill in American history, then a government report came out saying that 75 percent of the sludgy crude oil is gone, and educated people actually believe it.
Here is a source of tension: We live with one outrage after the next, but who, exactly, gets angry? Have you raised your voice once about what you see in the news? Have you pounded a tabletop? Have you smashed anything? Or are you taking your anger out on yourself? I think that we live with the fear that if we express the least modicum of anger, rage, passion, or determination, we’re going to lose control totally.
And our stress keeps building. I’m not impressed by our collective tension level so much as I am by how we live with the mystery of where it’s coming from. We all agree that it makes perfect sense to be panicky, but what is the issue? The most down-to-earth answer may be found in this thing we call the economy, but the kind of stress we’re living with predates the Great Recession by years.
On a personal level, we experience growth, and we may “work on ourselves,” yet there seems to be no obvious point of culmination or breakthrough, much less a destination. Every bit of progress demands another. Every healing process opens the way to another; turn your awareness inward and there is always a deeper layer. Relationships present us with the same questions no matter whose face we’re looking at. Eye contact in a mirror is still shrouded in taboo. We’re always in this process of awakening, but collectively we never seem to get up and face the day. We’re confronted by repeated, seemingly important events or personal turning points that are supposed to help us “get it.” They keep rolling along, challenging us again and again to reorient ourselves. Looked at one way, these may be part of a series of microcorrections that will eventually add up to an actual shift of direction that we will notice only after it has happened.
Our current astrology, large though it seems, is really midstream of a long process, one that is closely associated with this thing we call 2012. (I covered that in the June 2009 article “The Road to Xibalba,” which is easy to search online.) I have described the cardinal cross a few paragraphs up. Planets all move at different speeds, and two of the slower-moving planets come into exact aspect in 2012. That’s the Uranus-Pluto square, which is the Sixties-like piece of the puzzle; this is close to alignment now but the precise alignments come in a series of seven events between 2012 and 2015. So even if we reach some kind of a peak in 2012, that energy extends several years into the future as this aspect works itself out.
What all of these events have in common is being relatively close to the beginning of Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn. You might call these the cosmic orientation points that help us see what direction we’re going as a society and as individuals. Whether we get to actual peak events or not, we have an imperative to stay awake, which is a challenge, given all the things we create to lull us back into the dream. And when we reach a real defining moment, it’s all the more urgent that we actually focus and take a realistic view, or things can get a lot worse.
For example, the 9/11 attacks were an Aries Point event (associated with a total solar eclipse on the first day of summer 2001). At the time, nobody questioned whether we should go to war with Afghanistan. Now, nine years later, that war has no point, terrorists seem to be hanging out everywhere but Afghanistan, many are dying, the whole thing is extremely costly when we simply cannot afford it, and there is no easy way out. So if we’re hoping for some kind of peak event, some kind of big thing that assures us that now is the time to wake up, we had better actually wake up and get a grip, because in that very moment we will have a lot to lose if we don’t.
This is the dangerous game we play when we depend on external sources or events for validation or orientation—but it looks like we’re about to get some. On September 18, Jupiter and Uranus come back into alignment for the second of three times, this time in late Pisces (the first of the cluster was exactly on the Aries Point—the first degree of Aries—earlier this year). The Sun opposes this conjunction at full intensity as it moves through late Virgo on September 21. This has the feeling of magnificent orchestration. When the Sun reaches equinox on September 23 (a way of saying that it opposes the Aries Point), the Moon makes a conjunction to Jupiter-Uranus, and then a few hours later there is a Full Moon on the equinox.
The Full Moon goes exactly, precisely across the first degrees of Aries and Libra—the “personal is political” Aries Point. This precipitates the energy contained in the cardinal cross, literally lighting up all those planets and nodes, activating a bunch of old eclipses that are still vibrating, collecting the energy and transmitting it into events on Earth. Specifically, the Full Moon is conjunct Jupiter and Uranus, opposite Saturn, square Pluto, and square both lunar nodes. This is precisely the kind of event that, shall we say, makes big news, and this one comes on like a storm. The Full Moon is exactly six hours after the autumn begins, and this kind of synchronicity always gets results. So when that happens, remember that how you respond influences many people around you, and if enough of us respond in a sane way, the direction of the world might shift in a slightly saner direction.
Yet there is a deeply personal turning point indicated: that bit about how the Full Moon aspects the Moon’s nodes. That is a picture of how deeply we want to release these old emotional patterns (South Node in Cancer) and get on with our lives. We keep trying, I know. And to the extent that we do gain a sense of what is possible, of some human contact point besides total overdependency, we have plenty of peer pressure to get back into the three-legged race. And that particular sporting event, if you ask me, is where our whole society is bound up. If only we could take up our calling to be free men and women, and by that I mean emotionally free, the world would, in fact, get a little better every day.
Read more at the Planet Waves daily astrology blog.
This article appears in September 2010.
