Congratulate yourselves, fellow travelers. You have incarnated into the least boring period in human history.Astrologers are paying special attention to the window between 2011 and 2015, with another spike at the USA Pluto Return in 2022. The world is in for quite a ride. To approach the Cardinal Cross years with our eyes open would be a very useful prayer to incorporate into our spiritual practice right now. We are dealing with big energies here, and we need to draw on the highest parts of ourselves

In the USA right now, only four industries seem to have escaped the downturn unscathed. Sales of junk food, alcohol, and guns are way up; and, as was the case during the Great Depression, Hollywood movies are raking it in. This says volumes about the mass mood.

The headlines are disturbing, the mass mood is anxious, and the weather is downright weird. The Earth and her people are flipping out.We need a plan. We need an approach that will keep us grounded in sanity and able to respond in the highest possible way. We need a perspective that’s way bigger than what passes for perspective in most modern people’s thinking. We need a model along the lines of what the Mayans had.

We wanted change, and we are getting it. Just not, perhaps, the kind we expected. Speaking astrologically, what’s going on in the sky confirms that major change is here and more is coming. Planets that rarely change signs are doing so. Pluto has just moved into Capricorn, and over the next three years Neptune, Uranus andChiron will make ingresses too. This augurs huge shifts in the energy field. The collective will have its mind blown. If each of us stays awake to the current moment, the way we relate to our world should shift accordingly.

Now that Pluto is in Capricorn to stay (for the next 16 years), and approaching an exact opposition with the USA Venus and Jupiter, it is appropriate that Americans should be obsessing (Pluto) about their values (Venus). This most materialistic of nations is facing ugly truths that would be much less distressing to a culture that cared less about money.

Value and worth For those sky-watchers tracking the trajectory of the world economy as it careens giddily under the influence of Saturn and Uranus, the next chapter in the drama will arrive with Pluto’s opposition to America’s Venus and Jupiter (Sibley chart). Coming to a head in March and April for the first of several peaks, this opposition suggests a radical shift downwards in the value of – of what?

Picture lightning striking a sturdy old clock tower. The cataclysmic Saturn-Uranus opposition gave us the perfect modern symbol of this ancient tarot card image, when the most reputable banks in the world (Saturn) collapsed (Uranus) like a house of cards at the Full Moon in September.

At this writing, the gargantuan Wall Street “bail-out” has proven itself to be anything but the panacea its proponents claimed. Washington's attempt to cut interest rates in tandem with international central banks has been revealed as too little too late. Whether the US government's partial nationalization plan will do anything to slow the downward spiral remains unclear, while the prospect of putting bank ownerships into the hands of a government as corrupt as this one are ominous indeed.