Jan 2020
The World and Us
The new year kicks off with major drama. The long-anticipated Capricorn stellium is now upon us. In early January, five planets and Ceres, the biggest asteroid, are less than a degree apart.
Wowza.
The exact conjunction of Saturn (responsibility) and Pluto (power) is the locomotive that drives this train. It’s the rarest piece of the puzzle, with the most world-altering impact.
But complex transits like this launch several cycles at once, each with multiple layers of meaning. 
Each of us has a relationship to this world moment (see “Staying on the Right Side of History”). To understand why your soul decided to incarnate when it did — so as to be the age you’re at now, while the global situation is what it is now — the first step is to locate the 23rd degree of Capricorn in your chart.
Notice what house it’s in, what aspects it forms. These will point you towards the meaning of these times for you, specifically. They show the area of your life where the tumult is most palpable, and they suggest your karmic purpose as a child of this era.
Group soul
There are important lessons to be learned on the level of group soul. As climate 
change has crossed over from theory to reality in the dominant paradigm, humanity is uniting despite itself, a consequence of existential threat (to be discussed at the Astrology University Eco Summit next month).
Individual societies also have group souls, each of which has to grapple with the urgency of the times. For example, Americans, as all the world knows, are going through a national meltdown. Uncle Sam is having a Pluto Return.
As an individual, you may feel this intensity only obliquely, as it reverberates through the headlines, or conditions your work environment, or other parts of your life that seem to originate outside of you.
As Outside, So Inside
I say “seem to,” because, ultimately, we are all part and parcel of our environments, both in the immediate sense as well as the global and cosmic sense. To believe in transpersonal intention is to believe that all of us chose to be alive during these times of 
collapse. Each of us desired, on a karmic level, to learn the lessons of this era.
So whether events in your private sphere are mirroring those in the collective, or feelings are bubbling up inside of you that seem to be a response to what’s happening in the collective, our job is to try to connect the dots between inner and outer worlds.
The essential lesson of January’s transits is to get us to understand – if not with our minds, then with our instincts – the links between what’s happening Out There and what’s happening inside our skin.
Uranus station
The direct station of Uranus on January 10th is an auspicious time to say a prayer to the god of change. Set an intention to rouse 
yourself out of complacency.
This will get you on the right side of the next great transit to come down the pike: the ingress of Pluto into Aquarius.
When we willingly invite The Great Awakener to awaken us, it is less likely to send us an unpleasant surprise. As our parents always said, asking politely leads to the most copacetic outcome.
Yearning in the air
As the month winds to a close, Venus conjoins Neptune while it squares Mars. This restless combination repeats the Pisces-Sagittarius friction that reverberated throughout last year (summarized in the September SkyWatch).
There is an ache of yearning in the air, but it’s probably not about what we think it’s about.