Turnings

The Solstice Sun shines across far reaching concerns this week.   On Tuesday, the Moon finds the Sun again in the last degrees of Gemini, the first New Moon in Gemini to go uneclipsed in years.   Wednesday holds the Solstice itself, the Sun’s exit from the abode of the frenetic Twins and entry into the tidepools of the primordial Crab.  Yet as pivotal as the renewal of the Lunar Cycle and the Sun’s entry into a new quarter may be, it is the weekend that holds the most eyebrow raising configurations.  Come Sunday, Saturn stations direct, laying down the ground rules for the rest of the quarter while Uranus and Pluto make their first perfect square, a clash with ramifications we’ll spend the next several months working out.

All the while Mercury makes aspects to both Saturn and Mars,  serving up a few extra headaches in the midst of important transitions.

New Moon in Gemini: Healthy Delivery

The Sun and Moon conjoin in the second to last degree of Gemini on Tuesday, the first New or Full Moon in Gemini in 2 years that will go uneclipsed. The Moon meets the Sun and the face of the Twins changes.  This healthy, normal lunation in Gemini heralds and reinforces other changes in the sign of the Twins.  Jupiter’s recent ingress will be pumping Gemini full of word-steroids for the next year, and Venus’ backward journey has laid a lasting emphasis on the doublemint Sign.

These positive changes in Gemini are not without meaning.  Much of the next phase depends on our ability to become comfortable with duality.  If we cannot find a peace with contending forces, how can we meet the challenges of an increasingly polarized world?   The two hands share the same heart, even if one knows naught what the other does.

Solstice: Half Time

Once again the Sun stands still in the sky, stretching the day wide across the earth and threatening to disrupt the long standing truce between Light and Night.   The forces of equilibrium will not stand such abuse, and so the seasons correct themselves.  This Wednesday is the focal point of this pivotal moment, holding open the space between seasons.  It is an ancient tradition here to get cross-eyed drunk, one orb forward, the other back.

The backward and inward looking eye is your own to direct, but the forward looking one should consider the quarterly synopsis I prepared for this Summer some time ago.   You’ll find it in the seasonal section of my essay on 2012.

Saturn’s Direct in Libra: Signed And Sealed

Retrograde since February 7th, Saturn stations direct in Libra this Sunday, the 24^th.   The negotiations have dragged on interminably, but it’s once again time to sign a new contract with the old devil.  There can be no hoped for manifestation, no enduring form, without binding energy to structure.  This binding takes time, and proceeds only along those lines of personal discipline we have committed ourselves to.  Saturn’s station asks us to consider what we want out of the coming quarter, and how much free energy we are willing to commit to that purpose.  There are no Great Works without great discipline and no great discipline without oaths to ourselves and to others.  The power of the contract confines you its structure, and if that structure is a valid representation of the principles you know to be true, your actions will not stray from them.    Firm commitments and valid principles will be needed, as the first half of Summer will test the integrity of buildings, governments and life-structures alike.

Uranus Square Pluto: Let’s Get It On!

Like first-round fighters testing one another, Uranus and Pluto have danced within striking distance since March of 2011.  The conflicts they’ve sparked between angry people and scared regimes have been dramatic, but are by no means the end of the story.  We leave the prologue behind on Sunday, when Uranus and Pluto make their first perfect square to one another.  This aspect between the planets is only the first of many, as this bout is scheduled to run well into 2015.

Uranus and Pluto will spend the next quarter in a square, with other planets dropping in to complicate the volatile mix.  Yet beneath the chaos is the power of the crow and the phoenix, the spirits of death and  life.  There are deaths to endure and rebirths to experience.  These potent planets do not create an atmosphere conducive to maintenance.  Change is in the air and beneath the ground. There are skins to shed, fires to be transformed by.  The games are changing, the players being assigned different roles.  The stories have unfamiliar parts with unpredictable endings.

Courage is required here, yet courage always wants a war.  The seething dualities of old and young, left and right, male and female are all conscripting armies.    As Saturn’s station the same day of this first clash suggests, we must straddle and equilibriate dualities to find our footing during this next step.  We are being asked to struggle against the dual pull of yesterday’s polarities to forge lives that exist between such common categories.  This formulae, the Golden Mean, the Middle Way, is old, but its relevance is once it again great.  Yet a synthesis between dueling ideas does not take place by ignoring them.  It comes about by willing to engage each side of an argument, speaking to opposing factions, listening to both Night and Light whisper their cyclic duet.