Waiting for The Big Thaw

It’s a bit challenging thinking about spring with the world iced over and temperatures staying below freezing for days on end. At least up here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is indeed on its way, and it will be commemorated by some rather spectacular astrological events.

The cold, combined with the astrology and the events of February, has given the feeling of a spiritual chill as well as a physical one. We just lived through an unusually powerful Mercury retrograde that is just starting to loosen its grip.

So, it’s cold out now, and still, the seasons change. Personally, I appreciate the arrival of spring a little more every year. There were years when I hardly noticed, and many others when April really did feel like the cruelest month. Most discussions of seasonal affective disorder and similar involve the impact of the lack of sunlight, though there’s another population that struggles as the light increases and the warm weather approaches.

That said, I think most people will be happy to leave their houses without bundling up under 10 layers, or risking life and limb by taking a spill on their driveway. Right now people in Boston are dealing with more snow than they’ve ever experienced, so much that roofs are collapsing and the city must do something un-environmentally friendly, which is dump snow in the harbor.

As for the weather on another level—that is, the movements in the environment of astrology—first let’s catch up with the past month. Mercury retrograde in Aquarius ended on February 11, arriving with much loss and many shakeups in the television business.

Within days of the station-direct (the end of the retrograde), Jon Stewart announced his retirement from “The Daily Show.” For many, many people, Stewart has been a voice of sanity through one of the most insane eras in political life. He began hosting the program right after the Clinton impeachment, through 9/11 and its aftermath, through the rest of the Bush administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has provided a psychic refuge from the pain of the news, and at the same time, set a standard for honest coverage of events that the noncomedy shows had to start living up to. But more than that he contributed to a golden age of satire that was perhaps the sanest response to the agony of George Bush and Dick Cheney running the country into the ground.

But the real water-into-wine or (perhaps wine-into-water) miracle of Jon Stewart was turning comedy into one of the most dependable and honest platforms for the news. He was not perfect; nobody is. He never copped to the problems with the whole 9/11 story, but then, I can count the TV journalists who did on approximately three fingers. Yet he took on the issues of the aftermath of war and the hypocrisy of politics like few other journalists.

That same week, Brian Williams was suspended as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News.” He got in trouble for making up war stories—or for letting on that TV news is often either fabricated or spun of little other than viewpoint.

The real loss here is not what a great journalist Williams was, but how much people liked, and even adored, him. People understood that he was an entertainer. TV news had a rare moment of its credibility suffering, though I think that these kinds of events often serve as prompts for other journalists to actually do the job.

The problem with that theory is, for example, that the authentic reporting job on the Iraq war was what we really needed was in 2002 and 2003, when the media became a kind of spinning wheel for the whole-cloth lies being told by the Bush administration. I saw some contrition for that on several different channels, including on Fox, though in the end, the sacrifice of Brian Williams seems more of a cautionary tale and symbolic bloodletting than a sea change for television.

The same week as Jon Stewart and Brian Williams were in the news, New York Times media columnist and modern titan of journalism David Carr collapsed in the Times‘ newsroom and died a little while later. Carr was considered by many to be a standout journalist but also a true pariah from the old school. He was lauded by the Times‘ management as one of the great writers to have ever passed through the newspaper.

Within those few days, longtime CBS News reporter Bob Simon died in a car accident in New York City. Simon had survived countless assignments in war zones, and even being held hostage. According to news reports, people had raised concern about the erratic driving of his town-car chauffeur.

In Los Angeles, Kyle Kraska, a popular CBS sports reporter and former TV anchor, was shot and critically injured outside his home near San Diego. And finally, Stan Chambers, the KTLA reporter who broke the story on the beating of Rodney King, died after a long illness.

All of this happened within a window of a few days. It was a very strange ending to Mercury retrograde, with so much loss and shakeup among news reporters, nearly all of them well-known television presences. From the standpoint of research astrology, these events helped document the connection between Aquarius and television.

In some ways it seemed like an era of television itself was coming to a close, making way for the ever-rising tide of the digital environment. In recent months I have taken a deeper interest in the questions surrounding how our immersion in this environment is shaping our sense of self, our relationships, and our communities.

These are questions that are largely taken for granted. For those interested, I will be hosting a conference call on March 18 looking into this topic. If you want to participate, write to me at dreams@planetwaves.net with “conference call” in the subject header.

And On Into Pisces

The Sun entered the last sign of the zodiac, Pisces, on February 18, where it will be until March 20.

The sign change came with a truly unusual New Moon that spanned Aquarius and Pisces simultaneously. Said another way, the Moon and Sun ingressed Pisces within two minutes of each other, while in the midst of a conjunction. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.

The Moon and Sun joined many other planets in Pisces—Venus, Mars, Chiron, Nessus, Neptune, and Borasisi.

Two of them are fast movers, planets close to us—Venus and Mars, which moved into Aries soon after the Sun arrived; the rest of these planets stayed on in Pisces, where they will be for a while. One by one, the Sun will make conjunctions to the last four of those. So we are now in a Pisces season with a whole lot of energy concentrated on that wavelength of thought.

The common thread of all these planets in Pisces is an approach to the invisible environment. That’s one way to think of Pisces—all that exists, but which you cannot normally perceive. You might think of this as the world dreams, the spiritual dimensions (astral, etheric, etc.), and the realm of inspiration. Pisces is as close to “the other side” as we get on Earth.

People with strong Pisces in their charts, or Pisces sensibilities, have the gift of seeing and feeling the invisible. What makes an artist or musician what they are is their ability to tap in and sense what others cannot normally detect, and then to offer that to us in the tangible form of what they create.

Planets gathering in Pisces make its vibration and its themes more tangible to everyone, and the Sun’s series of conjunctions will highlight that fact. This is a two-sided story; with Pisces there are always diverse viewpoints and the potential for things to get slippery. That calls for awareness and for points of reference, which we have in abundance.

Perhaps the most difficult to grasp is Neptune, the modern planet most closely associated with Pisces, now in its home sign. Neptune, the lord of waters, is refreshing the ocean of Pisces. It’s adding a mystical flavor, and a creative inspiration, to those who can tune into it (note that the word “tune” is inherent in Neptune, a hint that it helps to do just that). The thing with Neptune is that it typically operates below the level of normal perception. One must really be an artist, musician, poet, or mystic, or apply that aspect of their mind, to experience Neptune as anything other than a form of fantasy. Fortunately, we have help.

Two of the planets in Pisces are centaurs—Chiron and Nessus—edgy creatures that require walking on fire, inner confrontation, healing, and often a good bit of the above in the context of relationships. Compared to Neptune, centaurs are grounding. They grab you and work on the level of practical necessity. You can think of them as very long-period asteroids, which cross the orbits of the larger planets. They often function with greater potency than an official planet. It is not their size but rather the shape and length of their orbits that give them their power.

You might say that the qualities of centaurs are deeply challenging and equally worth rising to the occasion. They can bring out the darkest and also the most vibrantly creative and transformational properties in people. They demand attention to real issues, especially ones that often go hidden. These might involve past injuries, ancestral legacies, and, most of all, claiming all of one’s experience and focusing it into commitment and strength.

We all have centaurs in our charts, sometimes speaking more loudly than others, though now, the Sun is highlighting them. The peak of this astrology centers on the Full Moon of March 5. This is the Virgo Full Moon. The effects will last for about a week on either side of the event, and due to the Neptune factor, they may take some time to spot.

There is one more planet in the mix, an interesting one, which lives just beyond the orbit of Pluto, taking 292 years to go around the Sun once.

Borasisi has themes that relate directly to environmental subjects, principally nuclear. But the metatheme of Borasisi involves the lies we believe and why, and the truth we don’t believe and why. There are many ways to phrase these themes, and many ways to unpack them, though they pretty much come down to that concept. As a scientific critique, the question seems to be about why it is that we mindlessly accept science on the level of religion, very much to our detriment.

March also comes with the last of seven Uranus-Pluto contacts. We reach a turning point in what I have been calling the “2012 era” this month. In many ways we have been living through what I call the Anti Sixties. I think that with the last of these squares, we are at a threshold of some kind; a point where something opens up, or perhaps cracks open and something new comes out. It’s unlikely to be immediate, though we may get a clue this month of any new direction or psychic space.

Finally, the big event of March is a total solar eclipse on the 20th. This is an unusual event in that the eclipse (which is also the Pisces New Moon) takes place in the very last degree of the zodiac. That hints strongly at some kind of wide transition—especially when you consider that the eclipse happens right before the very first degree of the zodiac, the Aries Point, where the Sun is on the spring equinox.

The Aries Point is where the personal and the collective intersect. In `70s feminist language, it’s where “the personal is the political.” But with Pisces involved, we might also say that the mystical, the musical, the artistic, are political.

This article appears in March 2015.