Cosmic Echoes
The sky remembers. Unlike us ADD-addled human persons, the sky has an impeccable memory. Right now it’s thinking about 2010 and 11.
2010 was the year environmentalism made a soaring leap into the mass consciousness, thanks to the assembling Uranus-Pluto square and its supporting players. The scales started falling from many eyes that Spring, when the BP oil rig (Pluto) exploded (Uranus) in the Gulf of Mexico. Then on March 11, 2011, that monster quake hit Japan, expressing the symbolism of all four elements – earth (quake), water (the tsunami), fire (the near-nuclear-meltdown) and air (the irradiated Japanese atmosphere) — in their most deadly guise.
As Mars and Jupiter ignite the Uranus-Pluto square this month and last, the world is energetically remembering the Cardinal Climax.
Quarter Turn
A few weeks ago, transiting Mars was squaring Jupiter in the chart of the of 2011 
crisis in Japan — when a flurry of news stories appeared about the Fukishima reactor. One featured a shamefaced confession by the plant’s directors, who have been lying through their teeth for two years straight. Now they were confirming that the amounts of radioactivity detected in surrounding groundwater have increased steadily since the meltdown.
The official story now matches up with what residents and investigative journalists have known for a while. As the plant has been leaking contaminated water into the ocean, the truth has been leaking into the collective mind. Pluto governs plutonium, of course, and Uranus uranium. It took a quarter turn of Jupiter (widespread dissemination) for the information to fully break through the crust of humanity’s denial.
The sky is reverberating with the events of two years ago, and so are the Japanese people. On the day Uranus (protest) stationed, July 17th, there were huge anti-nuclear rallies in Tokyo — the largest that nation has ever seen. Not known for being politically demonstrative, the Japanese public poured into the streets in the hundreds of 
thousands, demanding an end to the nuclear industry and the resignation of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda for having enabled the cover-ups.
Fracking
Also during the week of the Uranus station, the journal Science confirmed the link between fracking and seismic instability.
The hellishness of fracking has had two years to sink into people’s consciousness. It’s even inspired a Hollywood movie (Promised Land), which is often the way issues find entry, these days, into the popular mind.
Welcome to Phase Two of the Cardinal Cross years.
Destroyer of Worlds
That Uranus station last month occurred on the anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945 (my thanks to cultural activist Charty Durant for noticing this stunning cosmic echo.) The ambivalent begetter of the bomb,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, has since become known for his dark eloquence in describing it.
“We knew the world would not be the same,” he said of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'”
Long T-Square
Since the events of 2010-11, the square between Uranus and Pluto has gone through three of its seven total exactitudes. With Jupiter in Cancer now igniting it through April 2014 (see August’s Skywatch), the Cross is receiving the longest-running provocation it has had since Saturn ignited it at the Cardinal Climax.
Jupiter and Saturn, both societal planets, represent what is conscious to the culture as a whole. There is much to celebrate when life-and-death truths (Pluto), heretofore unadmitted, explode (Uranus) into public acknowledgement (Jupiter).
On an individual level, the Jupiter T-square bodes a release of the highest potential of these two transformational planets within the psyches of each one of us. Uranus in Aries, if we dare to take it to this level, promises a fearless integrity and the courage to act on it. Pluto 
in Capricorn promises us that wherever we are the most riddled with obsolete attitudes and embarrassing compulsions, that’s the very area where we can become the most powerful, once we go through the requisite crash and burn.
Subtly and with Grace
Knowing ahead of time about this mythic process means we don’t have to crash and burn in painful ways. When we understand the symbolism of the transit we can steer ourselves through it subtly, even gracefully. As we enter the second half of the exactitude period, it becomes ever more important to know the difference between using the square blindly and using it mindfully.
In the new lecture of my Cardinal Cross series, focusing on the upcoming Equinox, I talk about the healthiest ways to approach these key years of our lives.