By Len Wallick
 |
Who’s to say when it started? One could just as well pick the day or the week before. Who’s to say where it started? One could find evidence for Peoria just as well as for Kathmandu. We certainly can say however, with whom it started. It started with us.
Just what has initiated, it’s hard to say, but its there for us to feel now. Of course there is the approaching vernal equinox. The days grow more equal to the nights. The temperatures become less extreme. Between the earth and the sky, a blue-green nascence in our minds. The harvest of a season passing. The co-creation of a new time, first in consciousness, then in exchange, finally in action.
As if to tell us so, the faster-moving, so called “personal” planets have led the way this week. This morning Mercury occupies the same spot the Sun did on Tuesday. In Pisces, it forms a sextile to the north lunar node in Capricorn. The future is talking to us but we must put in the effort of listening in order to hear it. Move on to Venus for a clue.
Last Sunday, Venus ingressed Aries blowing a hot fire trine kiss to Mars which promptly tipped forward from the edge of Leo. Passion igniting will. Think of the timing and stand in awe. This now has never before happened precisely like that. That’s the beginning but it’s not the pattern.
Before she could indulge selfish desire, Venus found that her journey had become a mission. To create the footprints in which Mercury, the Sun, Uranus and Jupiter will later walk. So we walk with her, or not. Bravely co-creating the new season, or holding back.
This will be a Venus in Aries such as nobody living has witnessed or experienced. Still in a loose but functional trine to Mars, her impulsive, youthful passion is informed by will. Still in functional opposition to Saturn in Libra her raw energy is contained by perspective. Today is the next step. A big one. A square to Pluto in Capricorn, completing a cardinal t- square.
So often people will ask an astrologer “what does it mean”? So frequently, those consulting will want to be told how to think. Most of the time, those questions have no honest answer. Today is an exception. The path of Venus in Aries is going to happen again and again and again and again as over the next several months three planets and the Sun follow suit.
Venus is the first one through the cardinal gauntlet, not counting the Moon, for which this must be old hat. This is practice. This is where we make mistakes and learn and prepare for when the big planets with long consequences roll in. This is good.
The square with Venus and Pluto can quickly and easily degrade into an expensive and fruitless struggle. Youthful passion wants its way. It is not easily transformed into a more graceful purpose. It must be mediated internally by a difficult realization. That surrender can be as meaningful an expression of will as struggle. The key is to get clear on what we are struggling against.
The imperative to have things our own way can easily be used to control us. A huge fast food chain made it their slogan. We have been superbly conditioned to accept being told what we want to be, what we want to do, what we want to possess, where we want to go and how we would like to spend our time and money. Mars retrograde in Leo (opposed to the ubiquitous social pressure of the collective in Aquarius) was a chance to figure this out for ourselves. One way or another, some of that got through. Now that Mars is moving forward again it’s time to search our pockets for that piece of change and spend it.
We can help each other. We can create and hold a space of safety and support for those who think for themselves instead of avoiding them or calling them weird. We can be informed instead of uncomfortable when someone declines a burger for lunch. We can back off on threat and aggression. We can be less demanding. We can listen without judgment. We can give authentically with no expectation of return. We can receive genuinely with no assumption of debt. We can be the one to suggest an apple instead of a bag of chips. Look around at this time. Betcha most interactions with others are just full of this potential.
So the power struggle can become the power generator. This begins with being aware of what we are choosing and awareness of the alternatives. It proceeds into accepting the responsibility for our own choices. It continues with being conscious of where a particular desire comes from. Is it something we formed, or something we were sold? Before you know it we are different. We wake up one day and realize what we called our will was actually our submission. And surrender furthermore, is not submission. It is a powerful choice to commit to change rather than resist it. Suddenly we awaken to a will truly our own. Pluto sure feels different now. Keep practicing, it only gets better.
Have a good weekend as we work our way towards a truly new Moon. Meantime, the continuation of the serial examination of the the mutual reception between Uranus in Pisces and Neptune in Aquarius is being further postponed until your clodhopper correspondent completes his further studies of this phenomenon.
Offered In Service
Hi Len,
Do you do private readings?
Thank you!
Zoe
Don,
I would love to hear anything you have to say about Pluto on your AC. My AC is 5:52 CAP, and life has been a little crazy already. I feel like it’s looming over my head now, and it will be for a while with the retrogrades.
Thanks,
Teresa
Thanks Len, again. It IS happening, this massive surge of momentum and I love how you explain treading through this tricky phase. All the changes we’ve been discussing and witnessing on Planetwaves are finally happening. Here we go! No time like the present…..
victoria
p.s.
Finally, it makes me think of this beautiful song by Joanna Newsom and the line “Oh, my love, oh it was a funny little thing…. to be the ones to have seen…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv4A6_EPo9o&feature=related
We sailed away on a winter’s day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, like all things, fades
And I can recall our caravel
A little wicker beetle shell
With four fine maste and lateen sails
Its bearings on Cair Paravel
Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
To be
The ones
To’ve seen
The sight of bridges and balloons
Makes calm canaries irritable
And they caw and claw all afternoon
Catenaries and dirigibles
Brace and bouy the living room
A loom of metals warp woof wimble
And a thimblesworth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble
Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
To be
The ones
To’ve seen
Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
It was a funny funny little thing
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
Len,
your writing is so luminous and lyrical and always the first thing I read on PW.
Today this jumped out at me and inspired me to share –
“The square with Venus and Pluto can quickly and easily degrade into an expensive and fruitless struggle. Youthful passion wants its way. It is not easily transformed into a more graceful purpose. It must be mediated internally by a difficult realization.”
I have a scorpio moon and a natal pluto that aspects every planet, chiron, NN, and angle in my chart except my cancer ascendant. I don’t encounter pluto – I live with it every minute of every day. I might even say we’re sort of friends. But as a double cancer with a moon in water, the intensity is more steam than fire if you know what I’m saying. Anyway, I’m involved with a man who is a Capricorn sun, scorpio ascendant and cancer moon. This relationship is sort of front and center for us right now as I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone with any sort of Cancer/Capricorn thing going on. He’s going through some difficult personal stuff right now. And lately what I’ve had to face within myself and learn to mediate is learning to give that which I want most to receive myself: the right to be needy, and the right to be cared for in the way I want to be cared for. He wants and needs space and time and solitude. He doesn’t have a lot to give me right now. He hasn’t fled, nor has he pushed me away. But he needs to be more with himself than he needs to be with me at the moment. Instinct screams “Fuck him! I have needs too!! He’s not worthy.” Um, yeah, right. Then in some weird otherworldy moment last January a most incredible thought occured – what would I want from him if the situation was reversed? And so I started giving him what he wanted, not what I thought he needed (which was really a ploy wrapped in “caring” to get what I wanted – his attention)
It chafed at first. It still does sometimes. But I managed somehow to scrape together just enough true generosity of spirit to allow him all the space, freedom, time and non-intrusiveness he needs, while letting him know I won’t abandon him while he works through these things – thing that frankly have nothing to do with me anyway. It’s not easy. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair. Often – very often – I want to ask – “how’s it going – are you almost done?” But I don’t. And the longer I don’t push, nudge, make offerings that are more about getting than giving, the more I find a sense of power and even a sort of relief in continued restraint, and passive, silent, unacknowledged generosity. It indeed seems that sometimes the best thing you can give someone is to simply leave them alone. Who knew?
Thanks Len. You help me every day.
Dear Len,
Thanks to you we DO help each other. Your well thought-out subject matter is truly a gift and one we all look forward to reading. Clodhopper indeed!
Mary Plumb in the Mt. Astrologer writes about this same phenomenon, Venus, Mercury, Sun square Saturn, Pluto, though without the depth of perception found in this article. She describes the resulting sensation of these squares as feelings of anxiety and dread. I will add the link to this article at the end.
She also wrote “My friend, Robert Blaskle, just reminded me that the whole time the Sun is in Aries (3/20-4/20), it will be in mutual reception with a newly direct Mars in Leo, so our masculine courage will be strong.” I know there is probably more to that than just masculine courage and hope you will add it to your studies and clue us in!
P.S. Be sure to read her commenters thoughts too:
http://mountainastrologer.com/tma/facing-a-daunting-pair-of-planets
(your commenters are helping me as well as each other too)
be
Len,
I’ve waited for words like these. Pluto is heavy in my chart and I have been feeling this transition so violently, but I am (surprisingly to me) not able to do anything other than persist in being authentic right now. Believe it or not, many people around me are accepting the truth right now, even if they don’t like what they hear. I think it is because, all of the sudden, I am able to deliver it with more compassion than before. This, in my life, is my lesson of acceptance.
The power struggle of my life has indeed become my battery. Thank you for the intelligent and sincere words.
Neisha Hirsch
Beautiful, Len. The seeds have been planted, and tiny shoots are growing – but it sure is hard work. Thanks so much for all the sun and water!
Love
Liz x
I love your analogies, Len. They bring color and depth to the conversation; and you have my many thanks.
I can’t and won’t speak for anyone else, but the “now” and the immediate future, without doubt, feel like the coming of an unstoppable change potential. Though, this has been the case for some time…I would guess at least since 2005, and perhaps sooner. The feeling is simply growing exponentially these days, somewhat like an accelerating train nearing the end of a long tunnel.
The various articles and postings I’ve read along the way appear to indicate that I am definitely not alone in this; though feeling your way through something as visceral as this is entirely subjective. In this respect, reading Planetwaves is like receiving a “message in the bottle”, as Sting so eloquently put it.
As Eric has said many times, the personal potential appears to echo from the changes occurring in the larger world we all live in…Aries point stuff. This makes sense; after all, we’re all related and a part of the same environment…we’re all a microcosm of the same “organism” (what most refer to as God, I believe).
I’ve got my ascendant directly on Cap 1, with Pluto in the immediate neighborhood; and my natal Jupiter almost directly on the descendant in early Cancer…so the T-square is pointing directly to the latter. In fact, all of my natal planets are getting pinged rather intensely. I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I’m definitely “feeling it”…like the end of something big, to be followed by something bigger, and with any luck, much better. For all of us…
This, my Len, was a beauté. I woke up before dawn, thinking about the 2012 cardinal square, the words: “Here we go…” ringing in the air around me.
Since I am not an astrologer, I can only map these passages through the PW talent pool. My intuition, on the other hand, is about half-astral (hardyharhar) so it gets the Word in from time to time. (Or is that ‘from space to space’?)
The Mars direct played out as a violent headache yesterday morning, then exhaustion all day as well as waves of sourceless suffering. I have NO objection to those, because despite their character as ‘pain,’ they are incredibly interesting. And as you have seen, they don’t interfere with my writing.
Owing to your good eye, I will watch how Venus leads this set of transits – and where necessity expresses itself as desire.
Many, many thanks,
M
p/s Clem’ll do. Just watch out for Bossy.
Pluto is at the exact same degree of my natal north node in the 11th House. Everything I’m doing with groups has a certain singular sense of purpose and drive, like I was meant to be here–that goes especially well for theater.
It wasn’t a big leap to understand that what I’m doing with my writing with our theater company and here has knit me up like a cozy sweater. I feel as if I know what the full package of me is, and it makes me feel at ease.
With the Mars retro over, its as though I have less of an ice floe to plow through this–seemingly after many years, and I’m feeling and seeing clear waters. Not that it wasn’t easy before or will be less harder in the future. It just feels as though I am in the “right country” of my spirit, and its good to be coming home.