Pluto, Neptune and Pickle Brine

Dear Friend and Reader,

I was in my friendly local yarn store the other day fingering some skeins of yarn. I found a beautiful skein of alpaca from Peru, dyed with natural indigo to the most beautiful shade of blue. It was like a fuzzy twilight. I wanted it badly, had the perfect scarf pattern in mind for it and imagined myself happily knitting with my two cats, warm tea, Brahms and all the trappings that go with fiber work. Then I looked at the price.

A salesman shows a 1kg gold bar in Tokyo. The future price of gold reached as high as $619.30 an ounce at New York Mercantile Exchange on April 17, closing at $618.80 and setting a new high in the past 25 years, up $18.90 than that in the previous trading day.

Since I didn’t have the $30 for the yarn, I walked out of the store empty-handed. I was sad. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working with crummy yarn because I can’t afford better, but the fact is, I don’t have the kind of money for luxury yarn. To me, this is the way to handle that great power we call wealth in our society: if you don’t have the money, you don’t get the product. To many, that is outdated economics.

Another person would have used a credit card to pay for the yarn, with the promise to pay back the credit card company later. You can pay off your mortgage with a credit card, buy a car with it, pay off hospital bills. With a credit card, you spend the money before you make it.

Money itself has gone from a symbol of property you actually own, to a symbol of a symbol. It has gotten more abstract. You can, essentially, buy whatever you want right now and pay for it later. With a system like that, the here and now of not having the resources to get what you think you want does not exist. There’s a certain timelessness involved with the current system. Buy now and pay later has become another term for: fulfill your desires, no matter the cost.

According to one source, the real reason this crisis has come about is greed. Too many at the top set out to make as much money as possible for themselves at the cost of all the smaller investors. Too many people wanted all the goods, and better than that, with none of the downside. On top of that, the smaller investors, with big dreams of wealth, began pouring their resources into things like loans for houses, selling debt, selling shares before they had bought them, selling mortgage insurance and all manner of things that make absolutely no sense to me.

I ask again, is the economic collapse that we’re facing right now due to greed? And do we all have to take a little bit of responsibility for that? Well, according to the U.S. government, who took it upon itself to buy AIG, we, the People, now own about 80% of that company, which means that for now and far into the future we have to pay for it.

The scariest thing about that is the weakness of the dollar (currently, 100 Euros is equal to 140 American dollars), the allure of more physical representations of wealth like gold and copper and how much of both you and I have. What we have here is a transformation of wealth and power. It is true that what we are facing is frightening, loss-promising, and possibly world-ending (on a personal and social level), yet the two agents who are conducting this cacaophony are also the two agents shining out like lighthouses beyond the choppy sea of what we’re going through now. I’m talking about Pluto and Neptune.

Pluto is an energy that is so complicated and full of might that whenever I see it in a chart, I find myself frowning like I do when I’m trying to read a Russian poem. According to Isabel Hickey, the icey planet is the symbol of spiritual evolution and change. Its power remains beneath the surface of consciousness until an eruption brings it forth into the light of day.

The underworld is a big topic for Pluto. In mythology, it’s where Pluto lives and it’s where he took Persephone. In current life, it is where we get gold, cobalt, silver and oil. Therefore, Pluto’s domain is that of wealth and power and the relationship between the two. In my opinion, Pluto is the power of power, the driving force, the gas that combusts in the engine that rumbles beneath the train and makes it move.

As many of you are aware, Pluto has been in Sagittarius since 1995 and is now heading towards Capricorn. During this period, we have seen the magnetic might inherent in Pluto’s energy come through in three big Sagittarian areas: religion, culture, and extragavence.

The Hummer.

Most of our resources have been spread across the globe in order to fullfill needs that are barely met by the products that promise this very thing. This past decade brought us the glitter and glare of Bollywood, the mass tragedies of the Heaven’s Gate, Solar Temple, and Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult suicides and the GM Hummer to name a few. The one thing all of these instances have in common is the magnetism of something better just beyond. In each scenario, the here and now is not acknowledged as having the same value as the beyond. This is the reason I can’t help but smile at the Bollywood dancers and the reason why my neighbor bought a hummer on his credit card.

Now that Pluto is leaving Sagittarius, the wealth of the nations is deflating. What was once an exaggerated sense of affluence has crumbled into the earth sign Capricorn. Pluto wields a heavy hand, but it is one that will force us into making decisions that work in the long run.

On an optimistic note, Capricorn is a sign whose power lies in its humility and practicality. It is an Earth sign, so we will all get a chance to realign ourselves with our home planet. It is also a Cardinal sign, which means the new design of the world we want is within the reach of our personal decisions. The power of Pluto is one that no can control. It’s advice is simply to surrender.

And now while this is going on and we see the world transforming before our very eyes into something that none of us can predict, at least not without the tolling of some iron bell somewhere in our ears, Neptune comes to our rescue.

This is the planet of illusion but also of faith. It is the planet of addiction, excuses, and lies but also of art. It’s been residing in Aquarius for some time now, quietly lulling many to sleep with self-deceptive allure and also beckoning the few to awaken and begin to redesign the world. Neptune invites us to take a creative stand on redifining our lives, dissolving the boundaries between what is real and what is not in order for us to take those dreams we have hidden and bring them up to the light of day.

Last night as I was canning some pickles, my partner came in and we began to talk about what’s going on. We both agreed that it’s easier to see the bad and that this has been a very long time coming. There is a lot of grief in the world and all of us carry some. We have very few elders to turn to for catharsis. The only ones who can undertake the work is you and I. As I said to him last night over a hot kettle of brine: there was a time in the very beginning, when our Ancestors were alone and had no one to teach them. They taught themselves and so became the Ancestors of the future. We are in a similar position now.

In other words, Pluto crossing from one sign to another is a call for us to reasses and reconstruct our values. Neptune is dissolving the illusions that we held about satisfaction. Pluto is showing us it’s no longer about making the bank. It’s truly not about money and consumerism and capitalism anymore. In a country where Presidential candidates spend millions of dollars on television commercials about themselves, we’ve really hit the ground with a thud.

So how will you start again?

Merry Met,

Genevieve