Aloha everybody,

I’m writing to you from the beaches of Kaua’i, possibly the most beautiful of the Hawaiian islands.  Now that I’m here I realize my plan of continuing to post to my blog was the product of an insane, city-dwelling mind and that there’s no way it’s going to happen.  I’ve gone troppo.  I’ll be here for another week and will be making no blogposts, no newsletter, no Twitterfeed until the stars guide me home.

mahalo,

Jamie

Last year you may remember a series of posts I wrote about the myth of Inanna, called Descent Into Love’s Darkness.  That was about the Venus retrograde period happening at the time, using the story of Inanna and her descent into the underworld as a metaphor for the conscious vulnerability that real love requires of us.

Venus has a full yearly cycle, which begins and ends when it conjuncts the Sun.  Today is the alpha and omega of that cycle.  Today, last year’s relationship journey ends and this year’s begins.  Venus will proceed direct (i.e. forward) until October 8, when it will move retrograde (i.e. backwards) again for six weeks, sending us all on another deep journey into the heart of relationship.  At that time I’ll write a post on another myth about love’s darkness, that of Eros and Psyche.  This is one of my all-time favorite myths.  I’m looking forward to it already and hope you are too.

In the meanwhile, one relationship journey has ended; another begins.  This does not mean relationships have to end.  Quite the contrary—now is a time of fresh starts and there is a sense of newness, a scent of spring about it.  The testing time is long past.  Love has been reborn.  Now is a great time to fall in love with those you care about, all over again.

This December 31st we have an extremely special kind of full moon.  Not only is it a lunar eclipse, but it’s also a blue moon!  A blue moon is a second full moon inside a calendar month.  It only happens in months that are long and that begin with a full moon, allowing room for another full moon 29 days later to still be in the same month, thus the phrase “once in a blue moon.”  Full moons are times of heightened emotion to begin with, but when you add the increased intensity of the eclipse, the rarity of the blue moon and the fact that it’s New Year’s Eve for cultures using the Gregorian calendar, the day of December 31st is outrageously special.

This lunar eclipse brings strong emotions and nostalgia to pressure as the sensitive Moon in Cancer is pitted against the tough-minded Sun in Capricorn.  Saturn and Pluto act as Shadow Agents, bringing in themes of integrity and intensity.

Details About This Eclipse

Date:  December 31, 2009
Time of eclipse: 11:13 AM PST
Type: partial (weak in intensity)
Visible in: People in Asia, Australasia, Europe and Africa will see this small sliver of an eclipse.
At: 10 degrees Cancer
Shadow Agents: Pluto in Capricorn, Saturn in Libra

Does It Affect You Personally?

If your birthday is on any of the following dates, you most likely experienced this eclipse:
December 26-January 5
March 25-April 5
June 27-July 7
September 28-October 8

Remember, not every eclipse touches everyone, but when it does, it’s usually noticeable.  A lunar eclipse is likely to bring up strong emotions.  The following script is just one possible way it could go.

You hear a knock at the door.  You answer it.  Saturn is there:  he’s a serious-looking older man in a dark business suit, wearing a power tie.  Next to him is Pluto, the Alchemist, in a long black robe spattered with various chemicals.  Pluto is carrying a large pot.  Something seems odd about that pot, but before you can argue, both of them sweep past you and head for . . . your kitchen??
You:  wha?
Saturn:  Sit down.  Shut up.  Do as you’re told.
You:  But this is MY house!
Pluto:  You’re not in charge here.
Saturn pushes you into a chair and actually ties you to it while Pluto gets busy at the stove.  Once Saturn has finished restraining you, you can begin to see what Pluto is doing.  He’s put the giant, black, cast-iron pot onto the stove, added a lot of some strange-smelling liquid and is turning the heat up.  Way up.  You notice it’s not so much a pot as it is a cauldron.
You:  You’re not going to hurt me, are you guys?  What did I do wrong?
Saturn:  Nothing.  This is just how we roll.
The pot is now boiling.  Pluto begins to walk around the house and grab particular items to put into the pot.
You:  Hey, that’s my favorite shirt!  I aced a job interview in that shirt!
Pluto:  Does it have sentimental value?  In it goes!
You:  Oh no, not that photograph—that’s the only memory I have of her!  Damnit, will you fiends stop?
Saturn:  Who are you really?  Have you thought about it?  Where’s your integrity?
You:  I don’t know what you mean.  You guys are just torturing me.  What gives you the right?
Saturn:  You are the amalgam of all things that have ever happened to you PLUS the essential ingredient.  The thing that makes you different from every other human being alive.
You:  What’s that?
Saturn:  What you did with what happened to you.  That one single driver inside you that decided what to do with all the things that happened.  Did you achieve or fail?  Did you love or hate?  Were you a whiner or were you heroic?  That moment of decision—how you act under pressure—is the crucial ingredient.
Saturn reaches into your chest and grabs your heart, pulling it out.  You have no idea why you’re still alive as he tosses it into the pot.  Pluto claps on the lid and seals it tightly.  Belatedly you realize it’s not an ordinary pot—it’s a pressure cooker.  As Pluto turns up the heat under the pot, the pressure increases until you think your heart will explode.  All the feelings, sensations and experiences you’ve ever had are suddenly compressed together with enormous force.  You realize there are few moments in which you made the heroic choice under pressure.  You want to die but find yourself alive anyway, and open your eyes.
Saturn:  You must change your life.
Pluto:  Got it?
You:  unh.
They pack up the pot and go.

Today Jupiter and Chiron are in conjunction for the third and final time in 2009.

Jupiter and Chiron have met on a giant cloud over Mount Olympus, home of the gods.  They are watching events on Earth.
Chiron: (pointing) Hey, Jupiter, you see that little human over there?
Jupiter: You mean the one with all the intolerance?
Chiron: Yeah, that one over there, surrounded by people different from himself.
Jupiter: Not too happy, is he?
Chiron: No.  Shall we?
Jupiter: Of course!
They link arms, then disappear in a puff of smoke, reappearing near the human in question.
Everyman: Wha–?  Who the hell are you?
Jupiter: Different from you, apparently.
Chiron: Yep, it seems that everyone is different from you.  Don’t you ever get lonely?
Everyman: I don’t know what you mean, but I do know you aren’t from around here.  So here’s the point-end of my gun.  Go back where you came from, before I shoot!
Jupiter sticks out one finger, plugs up the end of the gun.  Everyman shoots and the bullet is stopped by Jupiter’s finger.  Everyman looks at his gun, dumbfounded.
Jupiter: You see, there’s really no need for this.
Everyman: Now you’re making me mad!
He gets out a bigger gun, but before he can use it, Chiron suddenly grows very large and picks him up by the collar, shaking him until he drops all weapons.  Several fall from his clothing and clatter to the ground.
Chiron: Silly human!  When will you learn?
Jupiter: Intolerance will get you nowhere.
Everyman: (choking a little) You don’t understand!  They are going to kill us!  They won’t let us just be—so we have to get them first.  It’s the way of the world.  If we don’t protect our way of life we’ll lose it.
Jupiter: But if you keep fighting, you’ll lose your life anyway.  And who will be left around to continue the culture you’ve built?  Why are you fighting anyway?  Who is the real enemy here?
Everyman is still dangling from Chiron’s grip.  Chiron drops him suddenly.
Chiron: (shaking his head) I can’t make you tolerant.  But I can show you what’s possible.
He picks up a rock and breathes on it.  The rocks clarifies, becomes like a pool.  In the rock, pictures begin to appear.  Everyman becomes fascinated and steps closer.
Jupiter: What do you see?
Everyman: I see my people, fighting our neighbors, as we’ve always done.  So many dead, so much territory changing hands over so many years.
Chiron: Do you want your children to die for this?
Everyman: I, um, I don’t know.  I want our way of life to continue.  I’m not giving up our ways!
Jupiter: What if you didn’t have to?
Everyman: I don’t want my daughter to marry one of them!
Chiron: I understand, but what if your battle is over?  What if no one is right and no one is wrong?
Jupiter: What if you could spend your days in building up your culture instead of tearing down theirs?
Chiron: And what if their culture contains some hidden key, some mystery that can unlock something in yours—wouldn’t you want access to that?
Everyman: (grudgingly) Maybe.
Jupiter: You’re a hard case.
Everyman: Yeah.  I’m not budging.
Jupiter: (to Chiron) He doesn’t seem to have any clue that he’s not unique in his intolerance.  It’s as if he really believes his culture is superior.  This is useless.
Chiron: (to Jupiter) I think it’s time to visit the one we really came here to see.
They turn their back on Everyman and walk into a nearby house.  There, seated on the floor, is an 8-year-old of indeterminate race, who looks up in surprise.
Jupiter: Hi there!
Child: Whoa!  You have got to be deities!
Chiron: You guessed it.  Can’t fool you for a minute, can we?
Child: Nope.
Jupiter: Bit of a mess out there, isn’t it?  He points outside with his thumb.
Child: No kidding!  Everybody’s killing each other all the time.  They killed my dad because he’s not like them.  They shun my mom too.  Did you come to fix it?
Chiron: No, we came to do something better.  We came to help you fix it.
Child: No way!  That’s not better—that’s worse.
Jupiter: Yeah, it wasn’t my idea, it was Chiron’s.  Blame him.
Chiron: You were born to be a bridge between the two cultures you came from.
Child: Don’t be an idiot.  How am I supposed to do that?
Jupiter: Because you want to be whole.  Because you have two sides and yet you are one person.  Until you completely own and accept both sides of you, this war will continue.  Make friends with both sides and you make yourself whole.
Child: That sounds hard.  I don’t know where to start.
Chiron: Start wherever you are.  Find the places that are broken in you and make them whole.  Gather people who are different together and get them talking about what makes them the same.  Help them learn from each other.  This will make you whole and it will save the world you live in.
Jupiter and Chiron begin to go up in a puff of swirling smoke.
Child: Don’t go!  I can’t do this alone.
Chiron: You won’t really be alone.  We’ll be behind you the whole way.
Jupiter: You can do it.  It is your gift to the world.  And you have your whole life to do it in.

For more insight into this year’s Jupiter/Chiron conjunction, see these pages:
May’s Triple Conjunction of Neptune, Chiron and Jupiter
Jupiter & Chiron Ask “Am I Too Big Or Not Big Enough?”

Uranus has spent the last few months (since July 1) traveling backwards.  Today he turns his face forward and re-covers the same ground.  Why should it matter to you?  If he’s passing through a zone where you have a planet in your natal chart, he’s bringing you shocking new ideas that can turn your head around.  And it’s still in progress.

This Is A Pivotal Day
If you are one of the millions of people having a Uranus transit this year, today may be pivotal for you.  Around July 1, you came to realize that some area of your life was in a chaotic uproar.  This was the chaos or breakdown that leads to breakthrough, although it probably didn’t look like that at the time.  Since then, you’ve been re-evaluating that area.  It might feel like a puzzle, the pieces of which have been thrown up into the air, forcing you to reassemble it entirely from the beginning.  And when you’re done, chances are it will not look like it did before.  Not in the least.

The puzzle is still in progress and now you’re waiting for the right moment to act.  That moment is not today, but today (Dec 1, 2009) is when the seed may be planted that will lead to the right moment happening in the next few months.  This day is pivotal in the process of you arriving at a whole new perspective in which so much more is possible than ever before.

Today (and I mean this loosely—it may happen as soon as 2 days before or as late as 2 days after today) is pivotal.  Today may be the day you realize your internal quest for understanding is over.  You’ve heard the message the universe is sending to you and you’re almost ready to act on what you’ve learned.  You can now gather yourself to take that action sometime in the next few months (between now and March of 2010).

“What is a Uranus transit like . . .”
Uranus is archetype of the Revolutionary and he brings a shift in paradigm.  A paradigm shift is a state-based shift, where enough momentum has been built up to cause a cascade into a new state, fundamentally different from the old one.  Uranus’ purpose is to present a new way of thinking about something, so new and so radical that everything that previously existed inside that way of thinking is now reframed and thus altered by its new context.  So the ways in which you were like a fish in water, taking the water for granted, will change because the very water you live in has changed.  Uranus’s paradigm shift is intellectual in nature—a shift to a new perspective where the old way of thinking is rendered irrelevant in the new context.  My favorite example is the way people used to think the world was flat and they shifted to thinking the world is round.  You and I may never travel all the way around the globe we live on, yet every aspect of our lives is different because we know the world is round, not flat.

“. . . and how do I know when I’m having one?”
First of all, you know by feel.  If what I’ve described resonates for you, it’s likely you’re having a Uranus transit.  (If it resonates, but only a little, you may be having a transit, but by a planet other than Uranus.)  A Uranus transit has a particular sensation of agitation and unrest associated with it.  There’s disruption and disarray in some area of your life.  You feel that something has to change and you feel unsettled while you’re figuring it out.  Maybe a new, startling idea has struck you like lightening and your point of view has already begun to shift and you are coping with all the fallout from that.

You can find out whether you’re having a Uranus transit by peeking at your chart.  This year Uranus is covering the space from 22 to 26 degrees of Pisces.  This will affect you if you have any planet in the space from 22 to 26 degrees of any of the four Mutable signs (Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius).

If you don’t have your chart, or don’t know how to read your chart, you might want to order your own personal Astrology Chart Decoder.  This is a special tool I’ve invented that puts your chart’s details into English, instead of astrology symbols.  Your Decoder tells you where every planet in your chart is located:  the sign it’s in, the house it’s in and the exact degree it occupies.  When you’ve got your Decoder in front of you, check to see if you have anything at all in 22, 23, 24, 25 or 26 degrees of Pisces Gemini, Virgo or Sagittarius.  If you do, you are definitely having a Uranus transit this year.  And knowing that gives you a chance to understand the major shift that you’re involved in and to see the usefulness of the chaos, instead of feeling overwhelmed by it.

“How long does it last?”
A Uranus transit will typically last for 9 months to 1-1½ years.  Today is just one part of it, a pivotal day in its flow.  The timing of your transit will be personal to you.  It takes an astrologer to look it up—it’s not something I can just tell you in a blogpost.  In an astrology reading you can find out the timing of it and how to move through it consciously, instead of spending this valuable time agitated and disturbed.  You can also find out which part of you (i.e. planet in your chart) is being affected by this paradigm shift.  Is it Relationships (Venus)?  Career (Saturn)?  Home (Moon)?  Or it could be something more subtle.

“What do I do now?”
Take a close look at the area of your life that’s changing.  Why do you feel so agitated there?  Is there some aspect of your life that doesn’t fit the way it used to?  You may have to let go of some old ways of thinking before all this is done.

Sometimes a Uranian paradigm shift is launched by the arrival of a new, startling idea.  It’s startling because it doesn’t fit into your old ways of thinking and therefore it makes you see ways you’d gotten stuck in thought-patterns.  It shows up the flaws in those thought-patterns as if to say, “You weren’t prepared for me, were you?  I’m a truly new idea and you’ll have to make room for me now.”  Everything has to change to accommodate the new idea but because the system itself has to change, this results in a cascade of changes that will not only make room for the new idea but also make possible a whole host of new, exciting ideas, thoughts, perspectives and approaches that you couldn’t ever have seen from the old point of view.  Holy ripple effect, Batman!  This can be a shocking experience.  And it massively widens your vistas.

Sometime Uranus transits are experienced by Uranian (i.e. Aquarius) types in different ways than other types experience them.  For most people, a Uranus transit is a time of breaking out, rebelling and going in a new radical direction.  But a Uranian may already be living that radical way, so for them sometimes the most radical thing they can do is to go conservative.  Sometimes that’s the only new territory left.  So if you’re already a rebel in the area where Uranus is influencing you, this transit may (paradoxically) stabilize you.  It’s like of like how ADD people need to take a stimulant (Ritalin, etc.) to calm down their already hyperactive brain.  (ADD is a Uranian condition, linked to the short attention span that seems necessary and appropriate to coping with the Aquarian Age of Technology.)

Uranus’ Gift
Uranus’ gift is that you come out the other side of this change with a whole new way of thinking about something.  That new way of thinking yields ideas and approaches that were not possible before, that didn’t exist in the old paradigm.  Your world is about to expand into new dimensions that were not foreseeable before.  You are facing a singularity.  After this, everything changes.  Are you ready?

When it’s over, it’s over
After this transit ends, your period of paradigm shift will be over.  It’s quite possible you’ll have another transit like this in a different area of your life in the next few years (it’s likely in fact), but this one will have passed.  If this period is frustrating to you, be at ease, because it will end, and soon (between now and March).  But also, and more importantly, take advantage.  Use this shift while it’s happening.  It doesn’t happen every day.

Art by Betelgeux

“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and kicks off the solar year with a burst of energy in spring. The first day of Aries is the day of the equinox, when days and nights are of equal length. There is a sense of rebirth after the cold, dark winter. The lands have gone fallow and are waking up again from their sleep. The animals (including human animals) wake up too. From here the light increases, and there is a feeling of warmth and expansion, as the days grow longer into summer. Living things respond with mating and . . .

For the rest of this post, which is a repost, see Aries:  Sign of Spring and Renewal.

I just discovered that for some reason I had posted October’s forecast dates through only the 14th, as if that was all there was to October.  I have now added the “Fortune Cookies” for the second half of the month.  It seems both ironic and appropriate that the last day on my forecast page was also the day Mercury turned direct, as if life ended there.  Now it’s been corrected–enjoy!

Learn about yourself while playing silly astrology games like “Meet the Archetype,” “Soap Opera” and “Astrology Mad Libs.”

Astrology Games will be held monthly at the Church of Soul in Oakland, California, beginning this month on February 20. Everyone is welcome, from novice to professional. For details, click on “Upcoming Events” here or in the sidebar on the right.

See you there!

It’s in the right-hand sidebar.

-Jamie

Check out the new forecast page for July (look in the right-hand sidebar under “Pages”).

Jamie