The Sun’s in Virgo and the Moon’s in Pisces at the Full Moon on September 12^th. Both are misunderstood signs, so this lunation can be hard to deal with.

We all have to cope with the blind spots of our cultural conditioning. It isn’t that Pisces and Virgo are inherently any more difficult an opposition than any other zodiacal pair; it’s that our society doesn’t value the impulses they represent.

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.

It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman chose to refer to  Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. I wonder whether a public speaker  elsewhere in the world would have made this same point by invoking a less explicitly commercial image. Such as, say, a mother saying to her child,

Here it is, the Murravian Mantra: Only by living through our charts can we understand the world, and our place in it.

From now until 2025, the world will be treading the waters of Neptune-in-Pisces. On April 4^th Neptune glided into the sign of the oceans, where Chiron had been waiting for it. That very week, Japan dumped 15,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

Recall that a year ago last April, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf on the very day of Chiron’s last entry into Pisces. Thus has the theme of wounded waters announced itself as a key teaching of the Cardinal Cross period.

It happened on the very day Uranus (shocks, shattering) moved into Aries. On March 11^th, the tectonic plates under the Pacific Ocean buckled and northeastern Japan was devastated by the biggest quake-tsunami in its recorded history. At this writing the peril of nuclear reactor meltdown looms as the most far-reaching of the quake’s attendant dangers.

For at least part of the month of March, six planets will be in Pisces; the sign of confusion or bliss, depending on how we approach it. We’ll have the choice to either float on top of the chaos or drown in it. It all depends on how well we understand this most elusive of signs. Pisces is said to govern illusion; but it also promises to steer us through illusion, all the way to the other side...

This month we’ll get a cosmic lesson about leakage (Neptune), making me wonder whether the ongoing saga of WikiLeaks will take another turn. The explosive (Uranus) and taboo (Pluto) nature of this juicy international (Jupiter) drama has made Julian Assange a major star, which is what happens when somebody is plugged into the world moment.

As we will see, Assange is a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto figure. Natally and by transit, he represents the disruptive and uncontainable energies of the three outer planets, all of which threaten the status quo (Saturn). The relationship between these three archetypes is hinted at by their placement in the solar system: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto all orbit beyond Saturn, the planet of law and order. Saturn governs that which is in-bounds; the planets beyond

Would you like to sharpen your attention in 2011? This is a New Year’s resolution that would be warmly received by the cosmos, judging by what the planets are up to. The New Moon on January 4th is the best day to send your intention forth. It’s an Eclipse, making it a doubly appropriate time to visualize a new beginning. And it is the day that Jupiter and Uranus re-conjoin to the degree of arc, setting the tone for the year to come

In December we‘ll get a big blast of the Uranus-Pluto square, the transit I’ve been calling the longest arm of the Cross. The Cardinal Cross is the epochal configuration of planets that exploded this past summer, and will continue, with variations on the same themes, for about six more years.