The Blessed Chaos that is the August Terrain!

Greetings Fellow Immortals! Congratulate yourselves,
you have incarnated into the least boring period in human history.

Like every August, there is always the Sun. This one starts with the Sun roaring like Lion-Serpents up the Solar Phallus into Leo’s emotional 2nd decan (degrees 10-19). Leo is Self-directed (some would say self-concerned) sign under any circumstances, but when the Sun is in Leo’s second decan, desire soars and there’s a definite emphasis on wanting things our own way. Check him out, he’s about to “Nut”! Against this, there’s also a lot of useful optimism and creative juices—if we harness it to good use—or good times, depending! So if it feels as if your in play, you are anyway. Bee-atch! Who’s your Daddy? Zeus, you say? Oh yeah mine too. With Mercury and Venus both starting the month in Virgo, in matters of the Mind and Heart, the Devil ((or God)dess) is in the details. There’s much thinking, conversing and sorting things out—not that conclusions and necessities revealed will be what we are expecting. In fact—the ideas aren’t the actual issue. Under most circumstances or in another moment you might be all for it. It’s just at the moment…having to care about things rubs us the wrong way early on in August. If it’s our idea, great. If it’s something someone else is saying needs doing, not so great. And yet there are those really pesky facts to contend with.

The Great 2010 Cardinal Climax of which I have spoken of more times than any single astrological event ever, for the last 15 years of my life, is upon us.
Pluto, planet of subterranean (and submarine) riches is now T-squaring Saturn (responsibility) and Uranus (revelations)/Jupiter (global implications). Together they have ushered into the group mind a blowout drama that is bringing up many urgent questions at once. From the point of view of consciousness evolution, these questions are the reason this had to happen. The disaster has triggered an unusually emotional public response. People are viscerally engaged. They are thinking about the role of cars in their lives. The phrase “oil addiction” has been coming up a lot. Many have started thinking differently about water.
There is a growing sense among the populace that if a bay is fouled miles away, our personal relationship to water is accordingly compromised. From an ecological perspective, this is a literal fact; and clean water is fast becoming the most precious resource on the planet. More people die from polluted water every year than from all forms of violence, including war. The physical and esoteric meanings of water parallel each other. We learned in biology class that humanity’s ancestors were single-celled sea creatures, and that all waters find their way eventually to the sea. On a symbolic level, water is the Metaversal matrix from which we all arose and to which we will all return. To assuage the anguish that the clean-up crews and the oil companies and the government have failed to assuage, we can press into service, right now, the symmetry between the physical and the mystical meanings of water. As astrologer Adam Gainsburg and others have suggested, one way to spiritually engage with what is occurring in the Gulf is to connect with the waters of our bodies. Such an exercise can help us come home to the Metaversal matrix that water represents, to resonate with it, to pledge allegiance to it. This ritual promotes a healing that is appropriate to the injury at hand. Since April 20th I have heard many people say that they feel the Earth has sustained a gushing, bleeding wound. This image is pure Chiron, which has been conjunct Neptune (the collective unconscious) for two years now. At the moment of the explosion, Chiron had just entered Pisces, the most universal of the water signs, for the first time in 41 years. Because it departs so uncomfortably from our psychological assumptions, Chiron is one of the most problematic symbols in astrology. It dares to propose that although human pain is a fact of life, when we follow its lead fearlessly pain becomes soul medicine. Understanding this distinction between pain and suffering, which is also essential to Buddhist thought, is the key to Chironic healing. (If we miss it, we’re in the same boat as the student of Pluto who reads death/rebirth
or I-A-O as merely death.)

Over the two years that Uranus (rude awakenings) has been opposite Saturn (big business) there has been a shift in how people define corporate accountability and social acceptability. With the DeepWater incident this trajectory has crested. There is a mythic quality to the disaster; everything about it is larger than life. This is not surprising, given that when the disaster began, Jupiter (exaggerated size) had moved into a key position in the sky. The big gas giant, whose dark side is excess was conjunct Uranus (explosions) and opposite Saturn (failure) when the rig blew up. Negative Jupiter manifests as hubris. The ambitions of the oil-drillers – who are still operating a dozen other deepwater rigs of equally fatal size, right now, lessons unlearned were all out-of-proportion to common sense. It is now well known that BP did not subject its stupendously ill-advised project to even the barest minimum of testing or planning. Misused Jupiter leads to excessive recklessness. The oil company’s petition to drill was riddled with short-cuts and utter Bullshit Lies!. As Naomi Klein has observed, in BP’s assurances to the feds of how little risk the drilling would entail, they talk about Nature as if She were a predictable, agreeable junior partner; sort of an unpaid subcontractor. After the explosion occurred, they scrambled to put together clean-up strategies that were so astoundingly ineffective they’d be comic if they weren’t so hideously tragic. The spirit behind these failed fixes, even their names, seems to derive from a bad action movie. Top kills, junk shots and laser-directed robots with diamond saws? It sounds like little boys dreaming up cool comic-book rescues. Goddess forbid the oil executives would admit, even now, that they don’t know what they’re doing.

And so my fellow lightpilots, we’re going to have to think about and deal with a few items we hadn’t planned on dealing with, and since Mercury entered the shadow of its upcoming retrograde on July 31, this is merely the start of a process. The good news is that what is (or goes) on the table now is pretty much the priority. The bad news is that the priority may annoy the tar out of you even if you know it’s useful and in your own long-term interest.

With Mars and Saturn now both in Libra, we’re aware of consequences, repercussions and impressions we make/have made on others. How inconvenient it sometimes is not to be in charge of our world! Fortunately, Mars in Libra lowers the ego drive just enough that you well may be able to fix and better things—especially if you use the Leo Sun to be creatively magnanimous. Yes, it’ll take a little Mercury/Venus in Virgo effort, but most of us are going to see that making a bit of an inventive effort is a far better choice than risking a giant fracas made theoretically possible by Jupiter/Uranus sitting right there across the zodiac in Aries. Oppositions (such as Aries/Libra) can strengthen alliances and allow us to “get hold of both ends of the problem”…or they can produce confrontation, rejection and alienation—.And yet…all we want can be ours this month IF we use our ideas as a base of operations into which we integrate the most potent needs and aims of others! As if to inspire us to lighten up, the months starts with Jupiter (retrograde in Aries) squaring Pluto (retrograde in Capricorn) on August 3 (August 2 if you live in the Pacific region). Jupiter retrograde is about internal growth, which in people-parlance is all about realizations. As the Sun sets in early August, we see three bright lights in the western sky: Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The one highest is Mars, which makes it the "Welcome Wagon"—the first planet to make contact with the slower-moving bodies. The Welcome Wagon is the planet that brings the next step in our current situation(s), whatever it is. Then we use the other planets in turn as they make contact. In this case, the planets they make contact with are conformed into a T-square configuration in the early degrees of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn). They are (in order of contact) Uranus (Aries), Saturn (Libra), Jupiter (Aries), and Pluto (Capricorn). So Mars makes contact with each of these planets in turn, followed by Venus. (Mercury doesn’t make it there before it turns retrograde on the 20th.) This actually started when Mars conjoined Uranus on July 30, then Saturn on July 31 (so take note of events then). At that time, we would have experienced rather "Martian" energies—decisive, even aggressive, action that pierces the veil of illusion in our circumstances. Our attention will be sharply focused on a situation that we already suspect will be "up," because it has to do with a pre-existing process in our lives (rather than something completely new). In August, Mars continues this process as it opposes Jupiter and squares Pluto on August 3 (even as Jupiter and Pluto makes their second square to each other for added intensity). Venus enters the picture August 6-9, repeating the pattern but with a softening touch that emphasizes how we love and relate to each other, and how much we love and value ourselves. Venus and Mars are so far ahead of the Sun that we don’t get the solar juice to complete the situation until late September. In the meantime, there’s plenty else to write home about as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto continue to interact with each other. Jupiter makes its second opposition to Saturn on August 16, while Saturn makes its 3rd and final square to Pluto on August 21. With only the Moon to bring their energies into our awareness, we will be feeling our way through more than thinking/using logic. In fact, Mercury is in a kind of "no-man’s-zone" as it slows in mid-Virgo to retrograde on August 20, with no major connections during August or indeed its entire retrograde. from mid-July through early October. This is a time when the energies will be constantly shifting, and we will thrive to the extent that we can be flexible and respond at a moment’s notice to their flow. The most important thing to recognize about this period is that it is a time of great opportunity if we can come from a place of possibility, curiosity, and openness rather than hooking into the fear, despair, or anger that will be in the human atmosphere. Lost in the shuffle are Chiron and Neptune, whose cycles with the Sun peak on August 20 and 21 as well. The healing journey they have led us on is about over, and we turn a corner on this process now. Relationships have been in a shitquake zone since Saturn re-entered Libra on July 21, and anything that isn’t fastened down has been shaken loose, even bringing many unstable relationships to the point of separation. No-nonsense Saturn tests all that it encounters: Insincere or ego-centered relationships must move into authenticity or go. The testing process is continuous as Mars and Venus interact with Saturn and its compadres until they conjoin on the August 20. Uranus returns to Pisces on August 13, taking a little of the heat of transformation with it. We still have to finish up our work of the past seven years since it went into Pisces in 2003. This is a month of transition, affording us the opportunity to learn how the Cosmos will carry us if we allow it to. With Uranus’s return to Pisces, it exits the Aries world of action, while Saturn’s re-entry into Libra makes it easier to apply the principles of balance and harmony in our lives. We can ride the spiritual zip-line again to soar over the denser energies that are becoming less and less relevant as we shift consciousness.