Let’s go Capricorn!

11 thoughts on “Let’s go Capricorn!”

1. Hi Eric,

   Early capricorn here 😉 “Sun at 0’55”,” she says breathing a sigh of relief. Pluto conjuntion and square are not COMPLTELEY on top of the natal sun anymore… close but… ahhh some relief. Apparently, saturn is going to come back and exactly square again… Intentions and hopes are that it won’t be as hard on it’s own as it has been with Pluto right there culminating it’s final conjuntion with the sun. And if I’m counting correctly, it’s been 5 passes that Pluto has made over the sun. 5!

   The plot thickens. Mind you, this sensitive Capricorn sun is in the middle of a natal T-Square…with Pluto and Mars. Birth data 12/23/71 2:52 Casa Grande, AZ.

   1995 12th solar house (with 3 planets in sag and a saturn opposition) definitely rings a bell. Graduating from college, abandoning the traditional path for what, I didn’t know. It quickly formed into a deep spiritual/psychological journey and inquiry. Cutting away, stripping down, shedding skin after skin. Moving, moving, moving. In and throughout it all was looking at alot of intense psychological stuff and marrying it together with sprituality… for an answer… for healing…for transformation… clinging to grace, whether it was at Amma’s feet or in a sufi healing session, at many moments out of sheer necessity and not knowing any other option at the time. How many times the earth dropped out from beneath me (Pluto transit was of natal 2nd house), I can’t even count. Each time I clung deeper to Spirit.

   In and throughout it all, I feel I experienced a universialty to truth. Love is love is love, whatever face or form of spirituality it wears. And also a major lesson came through that time that sometimes things and people can wear the appearance of love, but aren’t.

   That particular lesson probably hit home the most with the Sun Pluto contact. And the T-Square associated with it. Trust betrayal. Betraying my own knowing to believe someone else, letting them lead, letting them have power to dictate my self-worth (2nd house) and influence my finances, giving my own knowing and therefore self away. The transit, I can’t believe I went through it. But, in retrospect (which is only just beginning to be possible since the influence is still in the air and the final pieces are still being perceived) how grateful to get to the other side of this. Childhood stuff. Father stuff. A bunch of bullshit to believe in, and why waste my time believing in that anymore and giving myself up to it anymore, when there is creativity, life, and talents to be shared and explored. Joy to be had. And pleasure.

   I wish letting go had been easy, but for scientific astrological purposes, whatever the set up, with EXACT timing, the Pluto transit really hit my nervous system. It could be diagnosed panic disorder, which I don’t want to label so much but can acknowledge. It came right with the transit, and right again at the end. In my heart, I think it is really about going to another level, letting go, changing vibrations… and just not having an easy time with it as it moves cellularly out of the body. But, I also think it’s the influence of listening to the power/trauma dilemma of the natal TSquare= it’s panicy to believe things about oneself and about life that are ultimately de-valuing and frightning. Now I have a choice. And, I intend to make it. The alternative has psychological and physical ramifications that just aren’t worth it anymore. It’s obvious. Giving my power away is no longer an option.

   Being a soul who’s wings beat to a different drum than society takes strength. Belief in oneself and one’s truth no matter what. How many mechanisms are in place to keep us under control and following the herd as it tumbles, rushing over the cliff… “Live this way or you’re not going to be safe. Live this way or you’re not going to have provision.” The worst is “What’s wrong with you –that you aren’t following the set way?” I’m so sensitive to all these things, but I pray that after this, I may still be sensitive as creative souls can be, but not susceptible.

   Peace and Blessings,
   Capricorn finding peace of being

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMouvawdbKc&feature=related

2. I missed this, but want to contribute. Jan. 9 1954, Des Moines Iowa 6:49 am. Capricorn rising (3 degrees) Capricorn sun (19-20 degrees) Mercury, Venus and Chiron in Capricorn as well. Pisces moon. Uranus opposes sun, merc and venus. Neptune on midheaven.

   This past year, I traveled 5 and a half hours to a job I didn’t like at all and then got fired. I was made to feel incompetent by my boss….but I really don’t feel that I am. I do not have any money to live on because unemployment says I defrauded them. I have gotten four speeding tickets this year. My horse fractured his leg. I managed to compete in the state championships in dressage without taking more than six lessons the whole year. This is a real achievement for me 🙂 My cat gained 3 pounds and moved out of the house when I attempted to bring in a companion for him. I returned the companion. I found out that I love to talk to people about wine. For the past year I have worked on the weekends at a winery in the tasting room. I love this job (still have it) but I cannot live on the low pay. In fact, I seem to be collecting low-paying winery jobs 🙂 I am anxious that I will have to move to SoCal and live with my 80-year-old mother!

   Pluto in Sag was not terribly noticeable. What was noticeable was 16 years ago when both Neptune and Uranus conjoined on my sun. My brother died of leukemia and I took up horse back riding. Horses were a revelation. I watched my brother die in the hospital. I got the point. This also happened with Saturn opposed. With Neptune I found that I looked different everyday and I felt that I was living and breathing the earth. With Pluto on my rising sign right now, I feel nothing much at all.

3. hi again! i answered the virgo rising call so i’ll try to keep my comments related to the capricorn sun side of my life, in that virgo rising “i can label and compartmentalize anything” sort of way!

   i mentioned a lot about saturn and my 1st house cusp in the virgo post so onto pluto, pluto, pluto… it’s not going to conjunct my sun for awhile yet, but i still feel this topsy-turvy motion… like anything is possible and nothing is set in stone. career-wise, relationship-wise, identity-wise… i have been so up in the air… feeling like i’ve been born again, not in the religious sense, but in the sense of having to sort of scrap the rules I’ve been living by and learning from scratch who I am in the world, what I want to contribute to the world, how I interact with the world.

   It is refreshing, because I have spent a good part of these 33 years feeling like shit (scuse the french) just isn’t working for me, feeling like I have all the ingredients for greatness but no recipe on how to put it all together without making a big mess and ruining all those expensive ingredients. But it is also terrifying because I have invested 33 years into perfecting this dysfunction, lol!

   Specifics… this year, I decided to pursue a career that I had given up on 17 years ago… my true passion. I spent the last couple of years doing things I thought I wanted to do, things I thought would make me a “good person” which I still believe is a worthwhile pursuit. Looking back, I think this awakening process began back in the summer of 2008, when I realized all my do-gooder ambitions sort of took a back seat to sex and money. I had to face the reality that my motivations were not nearly as altruistic or intrinsic as I had conned myself into believing.

   So 2009 was the year when I had to begin asking myself what really makes me happy in life besides pats on the back (which I’m not knocking) and now I’m hitting a moment where I think I have some idea and now I have to reckon with how hard I am willing to work, how much I am willing to sacrifice, how long I am willing to wait, how many obstacles am I willing to overcome in order to not back down when the going gets rough, in order to not be a wimp and minimize what I really want and need for my soul’s satisfaction because I am too afraid or lazy to go after it. Or because I have gotten it into my head that I shouldn’t have to work *this* hard for X or Y or Z.

   Am I feeling my inner She-Ra or what? LOL

   Quickly, romantically… I have started to peel the doormat sign off my face and develop the courage to let that little voice inside me talk to some of you people out there, lol, ask for what I want, deal with not getting my way (and not shutting down pre-emptively because it’s better to not ask than to be told no), communicate my unpleasant feelings instead of bricking up like a skyscraper, and deal with the jello-ness of it all… the lack of certainty, of absolute rights and wrongs, the drama of dealing with another actual person instead of the figments of my imagination that I tend to superimpose on real live, breathing people with thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, baggage, etc. of their own.

   i wonder how the nodes and retrogrades and eclipses… oh right, the eclipses. well i have gone on long enough. suffice to say, july was the month from hell. but i am still here and that is what counts. thanks for letting us share, eric! hope i didn’t ramble on too long 🙂

4. I’m an early Cap (Dec 26, 1967) with Gem rising. I will echo a prior comment – the internal transformation going on has been immense. I have been on a very intense spiritual path with very fruitful results. The changes internally have been powerful and disruptive. My romantic life has gotten a whole lot better. My work situation has gotten a whole lot better, and I am in a good financial position. But I am ready to make a big break with my current life’s structure, and do something that is fulfilling. I am no longer interested in positions of power and authority, I am interested in being happy spiritually and linked in with the world of people. This seems surprising for a Cap, but it is very clear that this is where I want to go.

   Right now, I have no idea how to do make changes in my external life. And I realize I can’t do it anyway, it has to do me. This is a tough spot to be in. There is no goal, no pathway, no actions I can take (at the moment), no decisions to be made. I am so ready to move on, but it is not here yet. So I am learning patience, and learning to accept what my life is here and now, at all times.

5. You can’t go back…yeah I know that in the space between my atoms. Haha…”my” atoms? That’s funny—there goes another million…hello new arrivals, etc…it’s all in motion. Who’s talking about wanting to go back to shitty realities I didn’t know how to avoid or transmute when I was younger? I’m GLAD the past is over. I’m not very happy there. It’s all moving anyway so no sense forcing the perception that things are otherwise. The belief that Earth never moves, is eternally still, and has no belly was held without question by Europeans for over a thousand years. The Catholics tortured, murdered, and otherwise harassed a lot of people to maintain that pigheaded idea. WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED! Ha ha…look-you’re moving! It’s like a demon who was and is fed by a holy motherload of human sacrifice. It’s a well fed egregore to say the least. I wonder how much that old thought form influences our perception of the flow of time. It’s almost like the oil barons, the coal barons, the war barons, the medieval church, all the beliefs that are burning down the biosphere seem to exist in an ontology where things never change. And there’s still a lot of people working the traditional State “Christian” magic with weak mojo for the masses, true mojo for the slave masters. But all around this crusty old masterslave something else is happening that masterslave can’t perceive, like a flatlander encountering 5 dimensional space. Human relationships that aren’t represented in the mediasphere, real things that will never, can never be represented, televised. I think a lot of the eschatological bullshit that’s floating around is symptomatic of the death of an ontology with a deeply entrenched emotional plague whose operating system is chiefly informed by a fear of change.

   WOw. Sorry to ramble but at least it’s not using up paper. Mars quincunx my Mercury I suppose. Well, these kind of thoughts are the kind of things I’ve really been grokking this past year so it’s still relevant to Eric’s research 😉

6. Oh yeah…you also asked about Pluto in Sagg. Well, my moon is at 0 Gemini to Pluto’s entry into Sagg happened after I had already been studying magick, Tarot and astrology since 1992. I was still very much in the theory phase even though I had been doing rituals that whole time. I still had a whole mad horde of personal and ancestral angel/demons lurking in my unexamined interior and 1995 was the beginning of the process of getting to know them.

   As Pluto worked its way across that opposition it reflected back to my child’s mind the face of a fiery demon that took me years to accept as an aspect of myself. I enacted the verbal abuse I learned from adults in my childhood on a girlfriend and one night in a fit of jealous drunken rage at an SCA event I tore down her tent because she wasn’t obeying my childish desires to pay attention to only me the whole time we were there. Of course it wasn’t my fault. Of course. It took me years to accept responsibility for my own behavior and it really didn’t start to sink in deeply until Saturn in Virgo when I started to get outside assistance with integrating these demons, and particularly this last year with the juxtaposition of regular gongfu practice and 3 encounters with abusive alcoholic men. Seeing that behavior reflected back at me in a calm, alert state really brought the truth home. Distance from my drinking until numb days allowed me to see my own behavior in the past in a new light and also feel compassion for those who hurt me knowing that they’re transmitting a demon of abuse themselves.

   Come to think of it I haven’t had a sex partner since the Pluto Saturn opposition. I stopped trying to find one I guess. I decided that being alone was better than experiencing myself as such an asshole ever again. Maybe I’ve gotten better if I can get my nose broken for no good reason and not get mean about it. They say that people never change, but They’re full of shit. Everything changes. Especially when a human being establishes willed change as a holy intension and follows through with manifested action.

   I think my personal experience of the Plutonic shift from mutable fire to cardinal earth can be summed up as manifesting my disease bright enough to identify and collect theories and techniques from anywhere and everywhere that might assist in my healing. Pluto on my north lunar node at 27or28 Sagg began to focus the laser of intension which in Capricorn becomes establishment of the practices that unravel the disease. Theory-practice.

7. Wandering Yeti returns as representative of Sol in Capricorn. I’m 14 degrees with Mercury, who rules my Gemini moon, at 12. Also hanging around my sun are lunar apogee Lilith, asteroid Eros and asteroid Juno. Ceres is at 21 degrees and Pallas at 2, which is where a solar eclipse happened a week and a half before I was born. So there’s the astrological context. I’m not yer basic suit and tie goat. I seem to be tuned into a version of Capricorn that reflects my Chinese year sign of the Water Ox. The rich and powerful of this culture seem like insane ninnies who can only conceive of time as a form of money with a view so dangerously myopic that they can’t perceive the likely effects of their actions beyond next year let alone past their individual lifetimes.

   So anyway, my Libra rising story is deeply related to my Capricorn story as they share news and gossip through their common planetary representative, Saturn. What this Saturn in Virgo with Pluto going into Capricorn and opposing my retro, deeply retro, so retro humans hadn’t even started yet Saturn at 0 Cancer with my Gemini south node 2 or 3 degrees away means seems to have been aligning my self undoing-reintegration project that I’ve been engaged in since the early 90’s when that whole outer planet traffic jam injected my heavenly yang with mutant wyrd juice with the help of others in the form of acupuncture, yoga teacher, gongfu brother to turn the idea of transforming myself into a real measurable thing. Of course all that preliminary work was getting to know the structure of what I’m in the process of unravelling so that I’d stop freaking out every time something dead inside me falls away and crumbles. A Taurus Mars direct but still walking through his retro echoes and ruled deeply by the whims of a retrograde Aquarius Venus studies his prey for many cycles before moving to attack. Also a quincunx from a 12th house Pluto/Vesta conjunction in Libra and my 12th house seems to indicate my experience of always hurting myself more than anyone else if I use anger to force my will on reality. I guess that works for some people, but I can’t do it.

   So focusing on this year I just had the 3rd of 3 intense experiences involving alcohol and violence from insensitive men. When Luna was exactly conjunct Mars last Sunday night a drunk teenage boy hit me with a sucker punch and broke my nose. It’s only been my gongfu training and the compassionate medicine of my helpers like my acupuncturist playing herbal tricks to get my heart to open that have allowed me to pass through them and chose my emotional responses via internal awareness rather than following all my old dead scripts that were based on the reality my parents and grandparents had. It’s a reality that has no knowledge of gongfu or yoga and trusts care and maintenance of human bodies to authorities. A reality that doesn’t believe in qi and doesn’t know how to change emotional states at will by changing breathing patterns and visualizing your internal organs relating to one another so that none can become an abusive despot. I mean, if my organs are internally at war with each other how can I be a force of healing for my people? I’ve kept to myself a lot to engage these transformations and practices, to diffuse bombs. I’m not exactly a hermit, but I’m very choosy with whom I share my space. This is delicate work.

   I think it’s the practice of Pushing Hands mostly with my friend Adam that have helped my previous work on self transformation ground itself. It’s an exercise that teaches gradually with repeated, regular contact with an experienced practitioner that muscular force and anger are as useless as yelling at the tide when you’re up against someone whose parts are not only all connected to each other but firmly rooted in the earth and guided by cosmos. If I try to push his arm away from me it’s like punching a tree, but if I move around the tree like mist I can be somewhere that’s not threatened by that arm. It trains me on a visceral physical level that shallow breathing is a shallow root, that force does not come from individual muscles but the whole double spiral sheath of the body’s muscles harmonized by consciousness, positioning the skeleton to do its job and hold the body like a tree holds its leaves and fruit.

   Speaking of which I’m learning about the wonders of winter squash right now and I think the bits in the soup are now ready to squish. Happy trails. It’s all in motion…

8. Hi Eric,
   I have Capricorn rising (5:52 Cap to be exact) Taurus sun, and feel like Pluto is this giant thing looming over my head. I don’t know what it’s going to bring, as K said above, but I know it’s going to be big.
   I’m trying to make friends with Pluto, to not be afraid, to think that whatever comes will come, and I’ll be different, hopefully in some good way.
   I did talk to an astrologer recently who thought Capricorn cross my AC was going to bring out big family secrets, finally, because of… Natal Uranus and Pluto in my 8th house, maybe? Now that really excites me, because I’ve always felt like there were some big secrets back there, and no one will tell me what they are. And there are many things about my childhood that are a big blank, especially things to do with my mother. I’ve asked her flat-out, begged her even, to tell me, and she claims there’s nothing there.
   So if Pluto brings those secrets out, I’m all for it. Other possibilities, I’m told, my husband leaving a job he hates and us moving, which I’m all for.
   Past year: money’s been really good. We’ve always been careful wtih money, but kids in private school and college are tough, and this past year or so, we’ve been paying off debts like crazy, very close to having everything gone except a very reasonable house payment. So we’re excited about that. Have our house on the market now and planning to downsize, after sending our youngest off to college next fall. (Another big change — no kids in the house.)
   Creatively, I’ve written like mad this year. Can’t believe how much I’ve gotten done, although right now I’m just exhausted and have no words left. (Unfortunately, work due soon, too. Oooh.)
   I am wondering if Pluto is going to bring about a change to my writing, if I’ll write something different. I thought for a while, I might not be writing at all, but now I think it’s just that I’ll be writing different things. But even that… I’m really not sure.
   Spiritually, I’d say the last 10 years has had me becoming a much more spiritual person and much more comfortable with my spirituality. It’s not conventional, but it’s mine and it works for me. I think to me, sprituality is about being of service to others, a bit of organizing help for people going through tough times, and it works for me.
   Emotionally, 2001 was very tough, nothing tied to 9/11 except the general unease of the time. I went through a serious, deep, scary depression, but came out of it well, I think and it changed me for the better.
   Thought I was done with that completely this past January and tapered off my meds and quit taking them. Only to take a nose-dive in March. Scary, maddening, frustrating, deep, quick nose-dive.
   Okay. Didn’t think we’d ever have to go there again, but I guess I was wrong, and again, I bounced back fast and feel really good now.
   Waiting to see what comes next.
   –Teresa

9. My Info: Dec 27th, 1984 at 10:47AM in Huntington Beach, CA (Cap sun, Pisces Moon and Rising)

   What a hell of a year. Truly. I have been on the insanity roller coaster, vacillating between elation at taking the tiniest tangible steps toward my deepest dreams, and then having to confront the gigantic, beastly incarnations of my most primal insecurities and fears.

   I cut off a self-destructive six year string of lovers and failed monogamy in April, and began studying under a spiritual teacher I have felt pulled towards since 2005. I have been restless all year, constantly needing to pick up and go to some place of refuge for a week at a time because emotionally and psychologically I am so worn thin.

   This has been a year of confronting a lifetime of repressed pain, shame, guilt, despair, depression, anxiety, etc. I swear, I’ve been wondering what sort of mental illness I’ve developed as it is all cyclical. I will be enveloped in a wave of almost overwhelming despair and pain, in which there is nothing I can do but sit in almost complete paralysis while I feel it to it’s end. At the same time, a valley is the base of a peak, and several weeks later I will find myself in the midst of creative bliss, with a heart more open and capable of loving, relating honestly, and balancing giving/receiving than I ever thought possible.

   Each wave deeper into the pain increases the capacity for depth of connection with the external world.

   However, it is exhausting. It is also extremely difficult to function outwardly when there is such a torrential chaos within. It has been a battle to resist numbing it all with alcohol, drugs, and lovers, but I am trying to stay present. To feel it. To be with it and know that the pain is a gift and a messenger telling me where I am out of alignment and authenticity in my actions.

   And all of these other astrology sites kept talking about how this was the year for Capricorns to be set financially, and I’m not really sure if I just missed the boat on that because I was floating in waves of pain, or if they were misreading something. I barely stayed afloat financially this year, but I did, mostly due to random, angelic benefactors that appeared in my life. I have never had problems with money, up until about a year and a half ago, so this is new territory for me. I am not a fan. However, I can’t seem to get myself to do anything that feels inauthentic for money. That’s the real problem. All I want is authenticity. I crave it all of the time, I push for it in every situation to the point where people get uncomfortable. I almost cannot avoid being totally honest in every situation.

   If I can even force myself to do something that makes me miserable, I go through it with this level of detachment never known to me before and if it is continuous, my body gets sick.

   My body and my heart have started a rebellion against bullshit. It is often painful, always exciting, full of possibility (and fear), and there is nothing the rest of me seems to be able to do to stop it.

   So, at this point that I write to you I sit here in a cabin by the ocean with a computer, a piano, a bunch of books, two cats and a bed. I moved to a small town, leaving a high paying job and a deeply connected community in the city. I have been here for six weeks. I know I am here for something important, to face and then accomplish things that I cannot even fully comprehend. It is terrifyingly overwhelming. I have no idea how it is all going to work out. I am lonely. Sometimes I am paralyzed.

   But, the thought of going back is not even an option. I could not stop myself from coming here, and though I grieve so deeply for the death of who I was, for all of the love left behind….The only path now is forward into god knows where and what and who.

   So, I don’t know if that’s normal for Capricorns, maybe I am just going crazy, but I wanted to be honest with you because you are so honest with the rest of the world. The work you do consistently helps me, your words remind me that there are many things larger than my little entity affecting the world. It helps to put the pain into perspective. It reminds me that there are others out there who crave authenticity, and that there is a ripple effect in following one’s dreams.

   One other thing: I have always been able to predict what was going to happen in my life. However, this past year, I have had no idea what, when, or where my next step will be until I am taking it. Despite this lack of premeditation, everything seems to work out. Even when I think I am in the most horrible situation and I see no exits, if I sit quietly, acknowledge the fear, and then go beyond it to ask the big black mystery for assistance, it always comes.

   So much love in my heart for you and your work.

   My best wishes,
   K

10. Eric-

    I’m not old, but I am almost 55 – lots of time to have things going on. My info is Jan 14, 1955, Abington, PA, 10:25 PM.

    I spent the first 40 or so years of my life being a pleaser and a fixer – it was always about what everyone else wanted and what everyone else thought. My mom was also a Cap – Jan 3, 1915/Phila,PA. Looking back I can see that I simply took on her life and problems – everything, only with a better education. I left home at 17, but took everything with me and continued to think as I had learned with my parents. My problems have been physical – bones, muscle, back,neck – muscle spasm pain. It’s called fibromyalgia now usually. I recognize it as psychosomatic, not a popular word, but a true one. It really does hurt and the symptoms are really real – the doctors just tell you it’s all in your head. Most of them, anyway. I have met a few who have actually helped along the way.

    Well, I bumped along from episode to episode of pain of one sort or another, My husband was in the Navy and we moved around and I saw Navy doctors – one told me I was too young to have these problems and another told me officers’ wives didn’t behave this way… I think I was literally screwing myself into the earth. My symptoms fit a clockwise twisting- downward, seemingly into the earth. Absolute misery. My symptoms have also been very one-sided: either the right or left of my body. At times the line has been drawn right down the center of my tongue – ugh.

    I met a doctor who treated me with medication and acupuncture and he sent me on to a psychologist who really gets it and a psychiatrist who really gets it, too. I have used medication to get me through. But education about astrology, tarot and thinking and feeling have carried me through to a much better space. I can think my own thoughts now and go my own way. In 1994 I read a book by John Sarno, MD about back pain. It set me on the road to freedom. I began to live my symptoms in reverse – counterclockwise, unscrewing myself to the surface. It has been a long, odd trip. I still have symptoms – headache mostly, now. Sometimes my life has seemed to be one big pain and I was carrying it around on my back. Depression has been a problem, of course. I think of it as melancholia – a thing people used to actually strive after centuries ago.

    Once I began to see things more clearly, I was able to have a child. This has been a great joy through the last 12 years. If I had had children in my twenties it just wouldn’t have worked out . I’m hoping to raise a young man with his feelings intact and on the path of toleration and kindness.

    The past year has been murder. The untwisting sensation has been intense and has its own symptoms – lightheadedness, a feeling of unreality, sleepiness sometimes, insomnia at others. It is all headed toward the light. I feel as if I’m moving upward, opening up to more and more, but without having to give up myself and my boundaries. I didn’t know anything about boundaries for 40 years.

    Finding Planet Waves has been a blessing. I live in the Washington, DC , suburbs – I know, people here are supposed to be liberal minded, but that’s only in the sections of Montgomery County, MD, where you can afford to be liberal. The further you live out from the city the more conservative people get. Washington is all about money and what it will get you. I’m still amazed and very grateful that Obama was elected, but Washington hasn’t changed any and it dearly loves to see political failure and downfall. I love Planet Waves for its optimism and forward lookingness and its absolute inclusiveness. The astrology is down-to-earth and useful.

    Keep the engrossing articles coming and Judith Gayle, too. I love the title – Cosmic Confidential . Thank you all so very much. Thank you, Eric, for keeping on – writing, astrology, photographs. The community of Planet Waves is important to me just because I know it’s there and thinking and living through these times every day just as I do.

    Nelda Ferlic

    {Have stopped reading a newspaper in the morning for the first time in my life over the past few months. This alone is revolutionary in our house. I’ve been with the Phila Inquirer and Bulletin, the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, the Vallejo Times, the Orlando Sentinel,and now the Washington Post. I love the paper, but over the past year it’s gotten smaller and smaller and what I use on-line has become more complex and interesting. Thanks to Planet Waves for bringing some of that old-fashioned reportage to the web.}

11. I’m what you’ve referred to as an ‘early Capricorn’, Sun at 1degree 32minutes of Cap, Cancer rising. This week I had 3rd and final exact conjunction of Pluto to my Sun (first one in Jan’09 and second in July’09). Earlier today Saturn squared my Sun. And since I’m a full moon baby, Pluto on top of my Sun is automatically opposite my natal Moon and Saturn is squaring my Moon as well. So it’s a double whammy.
    I could write a book on all that I’ve been through over the last 1-2 years. But instead of listing the individual events/experiences, I’ll write about the results of it all. The biggest thing that has come out of this transit is the ability to stay calm and grounded in midst of complete chaos and destruction. I’ve had to give up and let go of many dear things/people.
    During the 1st conjunction from Pluto to my Sun the stage was clearly set for what was to follow, though I didn’t realize it at that time. Now looking back I see I was given a chance to make the changes/let go of certain things/people, but I did not do it.
    Then the July eclipses hit (the July 7th lunar eclipse was exactly conjunct my AC/DC axis) and the 2nd of the 3 conjunctions of Pluto to my Sun was the same week, that’s when pretty much all hell broke loose. Now the circumstances forced me to make the changes that I had resisted to make the first time around in Jan. Now it was a point of no return, there was no option left but to let go of what I didn’t want to.
    Now at the time of 3rd conjunction, there is a clear sense of completion. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, finally after months of long dark lonely passage.
    This transit has tested my faith. It’s almost like someone was holding me, hanging by a thread over a cliff, and saying, “Now I’m going to cut your attachment to this thread that you’re hanging on to for dear life and you have to show me that you can fly on your own, on your faith”.
    Grief, pain, loneliness all hits me in waves, it comes and goes. I’ve surrendered in the truest sense of that word to that higher power. Now I experience pain, but it neither swallows me nor drowns me. I’ve come to realize that I’m stronger than my pain.
    Pain, loss, grief no longer have the power to influence me or control me because I’m no longer scared of them and I no longer have to make choices just to avoid pain/loneliness.
    There is a sense of strange detachment, as if I’m watching my life as a show from the audience. As if I’m in it and out of it all at the same time.
    I learnt from an astrologer once that Pluto’s transits are all under the surface. I can vouch for that. Hardly anything has changed in my life on the surface. The destruction, the transformation, all of it has been deep but under the cover. I’ve experienced Saturn transits as frequently where the structure of your life visibly changes. But Pluto’s effects are not visible to the naked eye. Those who see me everyday but don’t really know me well, won’t even know I’m going through something so profound and deep.
    This transit has showed me what I’m made of and to my surprise I’m made of a lot more than I ever gave myself credit for. I’ve connected to my Higher Source, to me true self. And the more I’m in touch with myself, the more I find myself in touch with all of life that is around me.
    I’m almost a brand new person, but it’s not so much that I’ve acquired new skills/talents, I’ve just shed the extra useless layers I was carrying around so that the true me is now coming through.
    Hope this feedback was helpful. Thanks