Aug 2011
Befriend the Month Ahead

I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that there’s nothing like astrology for knowing which way the wind is blowing. Not just in our own individual life, but knowing the meaning of the storms we’re all being buffeted by together right now, during this thrilling, surreal, crazy-making epoch.

The Moon is closer to us than any other celestial body ; not only astronomically but in other ways as well. As planetary cycles go, the lunar cycle is a relatively accessible chunk of time to wrap our minds around. The emotional arc it symbolizes is short enough to relate to, psychologically. Sizing up the major transits of a given month is an easy way to stay astrologically organized. It helps us feel in synch with the cosmos.

So even if you do no other kind of transit tracking, try to keep tabs on the month to come. Once we’ve familiarized ourselves with the twists and turns of the upcoming four weeks, the future feels less daunting. The more we do it, the easier it becomes to get a sense of the nature of the period. The month starts to take on a distinct character. We can become its ally. We can friend it. When we do this, we’ll be aligned with whatever chooses to happen on the event level.

Star of the Show

August opens with a new lunar cycle: the New Moon in Leo of July 30^th. Neptune dips back into Aquarius in August; Mercury has a retrograde spell, dipping back into Leo; Venus ingresses forward into Virgo; and Jupiter pivots in Taurus on the 30th.

But there’s no question who the star is of this show. It’s Mars.

From the 7th through the 11th, the god of war will be in early Cancer, bisecting the Longest Arm of the Cross. And when we factor transiting Saturn into the mix, we get a full-on Grand Cross. This is the tinderbox pattern that astrologers were calling “the Cardinal Climax” during the summer of 2010.

There’s an enormous amount of tension in the air. It is forcing us to take action (Mars), in a way that is as radical (Uranus) and uncompromising (Pluto) as our particular personalities and circumstances allow.

Early to mid-August is one of those trigger points that can be glimpsed in the landscape of the month to come. It is good to take note of these in an abstract way: imagine them as daunting mountain peaks in the distance. We don’t know yet what we’ll do when we come right up upon them. But we do know we’ll be challenged to summon up the boldest and best in ourselves.

It Starts with Noticing

The Cardinal Cross period as a whole (2008-2023) is trying to sensitize us to the meaning of our role in the larger collective. A tension exists between our own individual sensibility and the immense force of the external world, generated by global events. Keep an eye out for this theme whenever a Cross-trigger (a quicker-moving planet, such as Mars, that comes along and provokes the Uranus-Pluto square) moves into position. In August this tension will spike acutely.

How do we keep abreast of what’s happening in the greater world, without buying into denial? We already know the corporate media isn’t going to tell us the truth. We can’t expect the increasingly tabloid-like press to describe the new realities (we’re now finding out, for instance, that some of the juiciest headlines in Murdoch’s News of the World were simply made up, out of whole cloth [discussed in my latest lecture, “The Emperor Has No Clothes”]).

And if we think we’re going to get the New Earth mirrored back from our TV screens, we will wait in vain. There is something obscenely false about the way humanitarian crises are discussed on the news. The anchor people are given things to say that are so spiritually disconnected that, watching them perform, one is embarrassed for them. How are they supposed to find the right tone of voice with which to read two sentences’ worth of statistics on the Somalian famine before cutting to a commercial? We know it isn’t in the interests of the modern corporate media to provoke compassion or understanding in its viewer-consumers. Quite the opposite: complexities are to be avoided at all costs. Thus the grotesque dissonance between form and content, as newsreaders are given a hairdo and a script and three minutes to address-without-really-addressing issues of staggering human pathos.

The Mars T-square in August is an example of a several-weeks-long time frame when noticing the inhumanity and insanity that pass for normalcy in our world can go a long way. Mars is giving us an invitation — perhaps the most important we’ll get this year — to disassociate from the conventional narrative.

There But for Fortune

If we want to disassociate from the conventional narrative, we first have to identify it.

Consider the epidemic human diasporas afflicting the globe right now. According to the UN, forty-five million people were forced from their homes last year because of systems collapse, climate crises and war. Half of them are estimated to be women and children. Many are escaping from villages doomed by poverty. Others are fleeing civil war, persecution, war, murder, rape, and mutilation. They are making their way to the relatively functional parts of the world that are closest to them, even if that means risking their lives hanging on to an overcrowded boat in the Sicilian sea, or allowing themselves to be stacked like sardines in a hidden compartment in a truck crossing the Mexican border.

On the rise as the Uranus-Pluto square nears exactitude: politicians like US Gov. Brewer of Arizona and xenophobic groups like the EDL in England and the nativists now making gains in Switzerland, France and Italy. Even an open, progressive society like Norway has now given us Anders Breivik.

In a social climate of animosity and fear, we should take into account that language can be a form of unconscious collusion. The term “illegals,” for example, deserves repudiation. What must be the effect on a person’s human dignity, to be identified with the noun “illegal” when you’ve done nothing more untoward than exist in a place where people don’t want you?

In fact, I propose we disassociate from the narrative at an even earlier linguistic step, by questioning the anachronistic term “immigrants.” The vast majority of these unfortunates are not “immigrants” but refugees. Continuing to use the word “immigrant”, with all its connotations of estrangement and suspicion, is one of the ways that people who aren’t yet directly afflicted by the catastrophes of the postmillennial world are able to distance themselves from those who are. It’s a means of denying, for a bit longer, the reality that in the era we live in, instability is not the exception but the rule.

Our Brother’s Keeper

In any case, we won’t be able to keep up the pretense for much longer. Those of us living in the still-relatively-privileged parts of the world will find it harder and harder to distance ourselves from our struggling brethren.

Geopolitically, we are all connected in the experience of global suffering. Everywhere we look, we see the First World’s own consumerism causing the Third World’s anguish. Two examples among many: the drugs whose violent sales networks are destroying civilization in Latin America exist to satisfy demand up north, in the putatively civilized USA. And the endless wars in Central Africa that are fought over columbite, the mineral used to make cell phones for customers worldwide, destroy the lives of those in whose homeland it is mined. To ignore these connections is to shut down a part of our consciousness.

As the Cardinal Cross years do their work, the perverse attempt on the part of one group of human beings to estrange themselves from their fellows will come to seem more and more arbitrary and grotesque. One of the great purposes of the Neptune in Pisces years (2011-25) is to drive home the experience of compassion. In people who are open to it, this transit will deepen the instinctive awareness that all beings are part of the same whole.