In June we face it again: the great conflict of 2021. Mid-month, the Saturn-Uranus square peaks for the second time.
The world has been feeling the impact of this transit since late 2020. It’s most obvious during its exactitudes (2/17, 6/14 and 12/24), but we’ll be trying to assimilate it into early 2023. Here’s a review of the square’s major themes.
Do you remember what was happening for you in mid-February of this year? That’s the last time the square was exact to the degree of arc. Think about whether your efforts to control things (Saturn) were running up against the unstoppable force of change (Uranus).
This month we get another chance to reconcile these forces — this time, ideally, with more grace.
Benevolent parent
Saturn is now retrograde, so a review is called for. It’s about how we apply the law of conservation. Forget about the political connotations the word has acquired. Think about the true nature of conserving.
The goal is to identify certain structures that have proven workable in our lives, and shore them up. The house of your chart that Saturn is transiting shows where you are trying to rein yourself in; hopefully, not by being tyrannical with yourself, but by drawing commonsense boundaries. The idea is to make our own Saturn the benevolent parent we all wish we had had.
If you are projecting your Saturn, i.e. experiencing it as an external force, you’re probably feeling its restrictions as more hard-ass than benevolent. Try to understand this pressure as a symbol of an inner mandate. Your higher self is telling you that you need structure, whether your ego wants it or not.
Free and unfettered
Uranus, at 13 Taurus, has been hovering around this degree range for about a year now. If your chart highlights the early degrees of fixed signs, you’ll have been champing at the bit like a horse in a tight corral. Uranus’ confrontation with Saturn in mid-June exacerbates the split that always exists between our need to define ourselves socially and our need to break free of the crowd.
Consider the house of your chart through whichUranus has been passing. It provides clues to where you’ve been defying, consciously or unconsciously, any compromises to your uniqueness. Uranus finds stability boring, and has been wreaking havoc with Saturn’s efforts to stabilize.
Uranus is a transpersonal planet; it doesn’t care about status, solvency or social mores. It’s wild life force, like electricity crackling through a wire. Unless accommodated creatively, it will cause a short.
The transit on June 14th is a test to see if we’ve invented a new definition of normalcy: one that encompasses the cravings of the deep self for a life that’s newer, freer and weirder.
Imagination and power
Mercury, retrograde through the 22nd of this month, thinks of itself as crisp and cognitive when in Gemini, as it is now. But early in the month it would serve us well to broaden our perspective on how the mind works.
On the 5th Mercury squares Neptune, as it did in late May. This floods the thinking mind with contents from the imaginal mind. The Sun enters the square through the 13th, deepening the tension between these two hemispheres of the brain.
Whether this tension succeeds in inspiring us or confusing us depends upon whether we’ve made an alliance with the realm of dreams and fantasy (discussed in my webinar on June 24th).
If we haven’t, we may feel overwhelmed by material the conscious mind doesn’t know how to process. This might make the transit less comfortable, but no less valuable.
Let the waters wash over you.
