Today is Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2011. The newly waxing Moon is in Aquarius. Whether you are back to work, still on vacation between holidays or still searching for a job and bracing yourself against next month’s bills, you may be sensing a subterranean evolution at work within you, and possibly some lingering edginess. The main influence is the Sun currently conjunct Pluto in early Capricorn (exact Thursday).
The Sun is almost always about expression. Capricorn, at its most fundamental level, has to do with form, thanks to ruling planet Saturn. At essence, Pluto is about our soul’s evolution. Therefore, this conjunction about the expression of the soul contained within a form – your soul, your form.
For some, working with soul energy is natural. Others waste energy kicking and screaming. Most of us probably fall somewhere in between, having good days and bad days until we get the hang of trust, love and surrender. But it can be done. The thing is, we can only each shepherd or allow our own evolution. You can’t do it for someone, and society can’t evolve as a whole unless all of us individuals are each doing our own work. Sometimes this translates into fully inhabiting a defined space; sometimes it’s bursting a form to allow one to evolve that suits our growth.
Does the idea of bursting forms sound frightening to you? Sun-Pluto in Capricorn can come with some fears: fear of breaking; fear of change; fear of progress, letting go, being real; fear of being trapped; fear of what our parents will think — the real ones, their shadows that we carry with us, the metaphorical substitutes we project onto in the world.
The thing is, Pluto itself is not inherently all about destruction – though that can come into play. Pluto also comes with the keywords ‘deep’, ‘irresistible’, ‘evolutionary’, ‘Dionysian’.
But what does that look like? Watch the video above for a clue.
There, did you see it?
Did you see a modern incarnation of Dionysus expressing his soul through song? Did you hear lyrics about touch (an earthy, grounding sense — Capricorn) and about not being afraid of what might change as a result (evolution — Pluto)? Did you notice all of these trained and well-rehearsed musicians (which takes discipline) rocking out with passion within a defined structure?
Whatever Jim Morrison’s personal proclivities when it came to alcohol and drugs, here his fire (he was a Sagittarius by Sun) was allowed a controlled burn. There is no guitar smashing or banshee screams – the presentation is formal – yet it’s not dead or watered down. It’s no surprise that Morrison burst form after form with his music in the 1960s, especially when you realize that his Sun, at 15+ Sagittarius, was square the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in mid-Virgo. That was the defining astrology of that era, and the most recent leg of the Uranus-Pluto revolution the world is warming up for now.
Here’s a question, then: Where do these ideas of fear and suffering come from? Usually they come from our own resistance to what growth asks for us, from clinging to things that no longer serve us.
Mysti, a regular commenter on this blog, posted the following in a thread over the weekend, and it fits today’s theme perfectly. She said it’s a fragment of conversation with a teacher named Nisargadatta found on Fred Woodruff’s site [emphasis hers, I believe]:
… it is in the nature of truth or love, cosmic consciousness, whatever you want to call it, to express itself, to affirm itself, to overcome difficulties. Once you’ve understood that the world is love in action, consciousness or love in action, you will look at it quite differently. But first your attitude to suffering must change. Suffering is primarily a call for attention, which itself is a movement of love. More than happiness, love wants growth, the widening and deepening of awareness and consciousness and being. Whatever prevents that becomes a cause of pain, and love does not shirk from pain.
Whatever prevents the soul’s expression, the widening and deepening of awareness and love, becomes a source of pain. There are a lot of things that can get in our way, and it can be hard to see them for what they are; some of these obstacles to our soul’s expression are not even our own, but carried through generations – something you may have come to understand better this month.
This week, Mercury is transiting in forward motion the final degrees of its shadow, that segment of Sagittarius in which it was retrograde. As it does so, it will form conjunctions with all of those significant points and centaurs in mid-Sagittarius that have made the last month what it was, with all its insights. You might feel a little edgy again.
As we close out 2011 and embark on 2012, that fabled year, take this week’s opportunity to review what Mercury has shown you about your spiritual beliefs, your ancestry and your connection to source. Sun-Pluto is asking you to express what you have learned about your soul. Maybe when Mercury finally leaves its shadow New Year’s Day, you’ll be ready to rock 2012 like Jim would have.
Looking for insights on how this week’s astrology affects your personal Sun and rising signs? Try out Planet Waves Light, our streamlined horoscope service. For deeper cultural context and astrological investigation, the premium Planet Waves subscription includes the same horoscopes, plus extensively-researched articles on Fridays.
“The Sun is almost always about expression. Capricorn, at its most fundamental level, has to do with form, thanks to ruling planet Saturn. At essence, Pluto is about our soul’s evolution. Therefore, this conjunction about the expression of the soul contained within a form – your soul, your form.
For some, working with soul energy is natural. ”
Yep. Right now I am feeling a combination of joyous elation and quiet reflectiveness with sweet remembrancees and compassion.
These three feelings are embodied in these two songs :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeirTx4Qtw8 (elation)
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0__c8hu2PY Compassion and remembrances.
:::happy sigh::::
Yes. Lovely. Beautiful. Perfect. Love.
Besides, isn’t he the sexiest man not-alive? God/dess Bless.
Lots and lots of pertinent dreams now. Remembering little things that give big perspective such as how neither grandma nor mom ever really went out of the house for – say, a walk.
Were they tending the flame in their own way? (Oh the places goddess has hidden.)
So much “stuff” coming out of the woodwork (structure) so I can see it for what is was and clear out and re-build (creation).
Ah.
Thx PW All.
wasn’t really hearing criticism, just wanted to clarify a point & express genuine appreciation that PW readers can help create a fuller view of our shared experience!
I have been sitting here puzzling about that myself Patti!
For me … pain … grief … exasperation … are all causally related and causally dependent. Therefore there are different qualities to their existence. They are also temporal. They come and they go! If there is stillness after each of these hotel guests has checked out, then I own nothing.
When I read of pain or grief as if it is a piece of wood in the back shed, then the fires of life are there to invite it into the crucible!
Alexander, I find that your prose today poses more questions!
“One might feel that the idiomatic expression of Mars in Virgo might be rather akin to a vision of frustrated autism.”
How would you know that…?
“Of course, pain itself can prevent the soul’s fullest expression…”
Some of the greatest works of art that have ever appeared did so because of just such a pain!
Arthur Rimbaud and his buddy Verlaine feasted on it! The classico tortured soul!
But tired of being inhabited by such dread and angst, he disappeared at the ripe old age of 38 and became a gun-runner!
Most of my successful musical contemporaries (male) felt the pain of creative birth as younger hipsters….angst ridden and starving…wrote classic works … made a fortune … became comfortably numb and cut off their own cojones…creative sterility by 40!
I agree wholeheartedly Patti…who says we need to fix it….??
Alexander …if you can feel the love….there is no pain or angst or grief … if you are living in the here and now … and not in your baggage!
“When the sun shines so very brightly at its zenith, we seek shade underneath a sprawling tree”
It is also a very good time to water your tomatoes!!
Lovingly
Paul Hill
I was likening (to myself) the processing of pain to a washing machine. Something gets sullied, gets tossed into the washer, soaked, sudsed, agitated, wrung out then rinsed and rinsed and wrung out some more. Pain evokes crying, crying wrings you out and then you get hung out to dry. Maybe in our speeding, no-time-to-waste clock-watching times, you don’t get the luxury of hanging out to dry, but get tossed into the dryer to bounce around in the heat for a while. Quicker than hanging out to dry. No time for tears anymore. Wrong.
Amanda, a really great blog post won’t cover every detail. Rather it will stimulate conversation and thought. This was a really great blog post.
be
Amanda – it IS a big sky – no criticism intended! x
I don’t know what authentic self-hood is either. I’m pretty sure the Self isn’t a fixed point in time/space. Authenticity is a daily practice of holding the tension between the inner and outer world. Everybody falls short of their authentic Self sometimes. And even the falling short has something to teach us.
“Mars in a sign for (not quite) a human pregnancy term feels like birthing…”
Riffing sideways on the theme of birth…In the same way that women can bleed without being injured, there is also a distinction between the productive pain of birth and the pain of injury (lack of understanding of this is why the medical profession is always trying to ‘fix’ the process). It strikes me that a more ‘feminine’ perspective (to the pain, anger, guilt, exhaustion, etc) might be useful as we feel our way through – probably not in a straight line. Embrace it, breathe through it, even if it hurts.
When the sun shines so very brightly at its zenith, we seek shade underneath a sprawling tree… 😉
oh, and thank you for the additional thoughts on anger, and its relation to grief.
i never thought of myself as ‘an angry person’ until someone pointed out some of my responses in the last year or two. you definitely know you’re in for some deep and possibly surprising/difficult investigation when you realize there have been underlying emotions going unrecognized for god knows how long.
“Here’s the rap: Deal with that anger in such a way as to have a meeting with yourself at core and you will be prepared for the release of any grief that may have accumulated in your bones, sinews and muscles – allowing Chiron to do its job as Neptune’s herald into the higher self (no spiritual babble here about an ego-less state, simply preparation for a more grounded self, at home in the emotional body rather than out of kilter).
“So process anger with Virgoan fastidiousness, not merely venting. Seek compassion and understanding for your core conditions by sharing your pain openly with peers. Understand the contours of your anger thoroughly, so that you may see clearly what you are really angry about – and then, the process of releasing grief, should be more like an underwater birth, freeing you into different waters rather than the old anger trap locked into your very cells.”
well then — let’s see what we can do…
“I know you were not saying avoid pain but it kind of read like that. … At the same time ‘loving the pain’ can become just as much a one sided mantra.”
neither was intended — not at all; more like “if you follow pain in to see its source clearly, you can see what is asking for your attention so that love/growth can occur via the soul’s expression.”
thanks to alexander for expanding the analysis — we just can’t cover the entire sky in one blog post!
———————————
“Is there guilt and karmic payload blocking your release?”
feels like a boatload of that payload…
“Here is a resolution point for the expression of your pain. You have to go deeper… into the bowels of your connection with those to whom you are deeply attuned in this life; with whom you can let go safely of any sense of inauthentic selfhood and simply be *accepted*. Can you do that? Do you feel that as a risk?”
hmm.
trying to suss out exactly who that is these days — not to mention, what exactly “authentic” selfhood really looks/feels like, i think.
Hi jinspace.
Your affirmation about my take on the sky led me to a couple more thoughts.
Mars, in echo, is not too far from its retrograde switch. One might feel that the idiomatic expression of Mars in Virgo might be rather akin to a vision of frustrated autism. Mars in a sign for (not quite) a human pregnancy term feels like birthing – something not usually possible to associate with a Mars transit – thanks largely in this case to its 2.5 month retrograde motion. But Mars will see in many of these top 5 events that Eric has delineated so thoroughly in this space.
So this Mars transit (and especially the retrograde) seems to have some crucial preparatory significance on the individual level.
For starters, re today’s themes, Mars is currently square Mercury (which rules Virgo). Therefore expression of any energies should not be direct or confrontational if it involves significant folk in your life in relation to your pain. Honesty around one’s difficulties and pain in general terms as well as the seeking of support from loved ones may be well aspected; volatile expression definitely not.
However, in terms of the emotional body, Mars in Virgo has a lot to teach us about the nature and process of release. Further, there seems to be a message about the impact of anger upon the body. Where Chiron in Pisces may speak of our grief, Mars in Virgo might speak of how we process our anger.
Anger tends to chafe for many people. We forget who we were ever specifically angry with and the toxins start to burn into the soul and so, also, the body.
Mars in Virgo, especially when retrograde, seems to speak of how we process our anger so that we realise that we are angry.. full stop. We somehow stop projecting generalized anger and simply begin to own it.. and its many effects upon us.
This is a huge part of healing. If you begin to access deep anger during the coming three months or so stop and ask ‘Who am I angry with exactly?’ Even if you think you know you are quite likely wrong about that. That anger will likely be superficial stuff.
Here’s the rap: Deal with that anger in such a way as to have a meeting with yourself at core and you will be prepared for the release of any grief that may have accumulated in your bones, sinews and muscles – allowing Chiron to do its job as Neptune’s herald into the higher self (no spiritual babble here about an ego-less state, simply preparation for a more grounded self, at home in the emotional body rather than out of kilter).
So process anger with Virgoan fastidiousness, not merely venting. Seek compassion and understanding for your core conditions by sharing your pain openly with peers. Understand the contours of your anger thoroughly, so that you may see clearly what you are really angry about – and then, the process of releasing grief, should be more like an underwater birth, freeing you into different waters rather than the old anger trap locked into your very cells.
Alexander – your interpretation resonates LOUDLY within (and without) me. And here I thought my thrashing about was all just hormones gone haywire. Thank you for your perspective.
Bravo Musicman! Beautifully said! And Mars is now opposite where Chiron was when Little Richard shook us up in the 60’s. Our memories (and youtube) are the manifestation of the Ghosts of Rock ‘n Roll; alive and well and with a new take on an old message.
And isn’t it incredible to watch the Moon’s process through a sequence of aspects? It is a new look at time; not so static anymore, at least for me. Not that I could do without my charts, but she lives for contact with the other planets and points, and she gives and takes, and grows large and thin. Our world view of the sky is her stage and we her audience, and she enters and leaves only to enter again. And again. “Creativity. . . . the expression of the river in flow”. Thank you for that.
be
Saw this this morning but family pressure kept me from responding. Process and awareness were the first concepts that hit my brain on waking this morning. I have to say I agree with Alex. I know you were not saying avoid pain but it kind of read like that. My stuff probably – it’s been a week where my own pain was rejected by a loved one. Evolution, revolution – sometimes it’s messy. The soul finds its expression in lots of ways. Awareness of process seems to me to be everything.
At the same time ‘loving the pain’ can become just as much a one sided mantra. I would add a need to examine where you are carrying pain that doesn’t belong to you, pain that someone else is denying, in an effort to ‘balance’ a relationship. And maybe where pain and guilt are easier to express than love. Likewise where we’re not expressing pain (or any other feeling) because we fear someone else might not be able to cope with it or might lob the accusation of being ‘needy’ or ‘childish’ at us. So maybe the overarching question is do we feel supported in our process – whatever that is?
“The thing is, we can only each shepherd or allow our own evolution.” Amen. Great stuff.
privileged teenage petulance, methinks
So… where would we place this one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pMM4iwC-ag&ob=av2n
I think he was a Virgo. And then well the name he gave himself…
The thing I don’t like about this particular Morrison performance is he seems so not into it, and it seems vis a vis this sort of straw man antagonist of the tv environment, an environment that you can see Little Richard transcend quite easily by passion, sincerity, doing his thing. Mercury also just blows the roof off by doing what he does. Morrison seems a bit petulant to me, stuck in teenage, not realizing there’s a much bigger world out there.
Astrologically, I’m not sure where all this fits in though.
To add to the push to evolve, Mars has been, and is still today, transiting over that area of Virgo where the mid ’60’s conjunction of Uranus and Pluto took place. He has been square the Moon’s nodes, which sat on the 14+ degrees of Sagittarius and Gemini for weeks and weeks, with the north node conjunct the Great Attractor and that whole bevy of archetypal representatives still in the mid-Sagittarian area. Now, today as Mercury opposes the TNO Chaos( now at 13+ Gemini), I think it’s time to let communication and thinking finally strike a balance between the creative soup bowl and the clarity of universal inspiration, as he also conjuncts the GA.
So Morrison’s life was/is a perfect symbol of the astrology these days. Yes, as Sam says, he DID seem spaced out. Maybe that’s the whole point. A space beyond the confines of our Capricorn containment.
I have greatly appreciated the commenters words here so far (thanks Alexander for clarifying the process of pain) as much as the great Astrology Today post. So many “crossroads in this project of evolution”; so many decisions. I believe and may have said this before, but the fact that so many people study astrology these days is probably because there is so much more astrology to study. When you put ‘us’ altogether, we are one big, fat multi-faceted cyber-astrologer. Something for everyone and something for all.
Don’t let the chaos get you down folks, it’s part of the process and we will all evolve. Express yourself!
be
Well…there is plenty to be in recovery about…then!
Chiron was at 18 Pisces when Little Richard sang “Whole lotta shakin” in 1964 … it would seem that Chiron…again in Pisces… is about to produce a whole lotta shakin all over again!
It moved into Aries finally through the winter of 67/68 … I guess about the time of the Doors “Touch me” video!
I saw the Doors at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. It must have been Xmas … the winter of 1970. We dropped some blotting paper acid…wandered through the streets catching snow flakes on our tongues…you could spot them 10-20 feet up in the air…select the most extravagantly patterned and glowing one, and allow it to nestle gently on your pink member before it dissolved into a beautiful explosion of sensational taste (it was exactly that!).
That Dionysian soulful expression is indeed the fullness of Chiron in Pisces. Little did we know how many of those truly great and vulnerable creative artists would not survive Chiron’s transit from 12th to 1st. Pisces to Aries! By 1971 the truly creative had already moved on up!!
This suggests to me that creativity is not an optional behavioural choice. It is the expression of the river in flow. The emotional journey of completion from dam bursting, through tsunami of the flood, the ark, the pairs of future breeding familial hosts, on up to the calm after the waters have settled; just before the next spike in the graph. For is it not a reassuringly regular repeatable cycle?
I had to use the processing department this morning Alexander! This in itself is not a bad thing! A square from Libra to Aquarius? But I worked it through, and I get your gist. The sense of the Moon’s journey today embodies … and is a microcosm of … the Soul’s journey itself. As Saturn trines Neptune, the Venus square to Saturn, emphasised by the Moon’s conjunction, with the added confusion of crossing cusp and Sun- Pluto earth flavours…is carried slowly forward releasing it’s loving Amore … as the Moon moves into late Aquarius … including a quick flurry with Pallas and Nessus (the road to hell is paved with good intention!) It then becomes free of cuspal chains … is full of glorious invocation….and mopves on towards the conjunction with Neptune, and an abundance of creative manoeuvres!
Creativity, with all its earthbound shackles of personality, birth parents, and the prison of the quest for external identity, breaks the dam and moves on to its flood. The Piscean Neptune ,which is soon come, will pick up where Jim Morrison ,Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin et al left us all with unfinished business.
As Chiron again moves into Aries around 2018, will it be creative casualties singing loudest…..? Have we finally learned to care, to manage the strategies that are necessary for creative juices to flow, and to sing loud with a voice that is heard way on up the M87?
Will we have we learned to love?
2012 … is…going to Rock … this is not optional … the creative fire is lit!
Mucho Gracias once again Mr. Wallick … the doors of perception are truly revolving!!
Paul Hill
OH MY GOD:
“Bob Dylan is my brother. I love him same as Bobby Darin [deceased] is my baby. I feel Bob Dylan is my blood brother. I believe if I didn’t have a place to stay, Bob Dylan would buy me a house. He sat by my bed; he didn’t move for hours. I was in pain that medicine couldn’t stop. My tongue was cut out, leg all tore up, bladder punctured. I was supposed to be dead. Six feet under. God resurrected me; that’s the reason I have to tell the world about it.” — Little Richard
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/28/john-waters-met-little-richard
Thanks to all for the grounding coming out of the first round of holiday excesses. I am so conditioned to tune it out (especially the Christmas music that starts before Halloween) that I become detached. This year, a “gift” from Pluto has been a bout with shingles for the first time in my life. (I read that shingles occur more frequently after sixty…Scorpio me turned sixty a month ago…couldn’t this malady have waited until I was say, sixty-eight or seventy?) Gives more meaning to letting go internally and externally.
What prevents my soul’s expression? I asked myself this morning if I am going to live life or am I just going to get ready to leave life? It’s time! Time to let go externally and internally and clear the way to live that Plutonian purpose (in Leo in the middle of the 12th house) here and now. (Thank you, Len, Alexander and all of PW!)
So, with Len’s wise words and today’s posting by PW, and the comments to both, with 2012 looming, I am feeling emboldened and empowered as Hugging Scorpio noted. It’s time! I am reminded of something Stephanie Austin wrote a couple of years ago about Pluto: “If Pluto had a bumper sticker it would read ‘You can either let go now or have it ripped from your hands later.'”
Relaxing the grip…
I am so grateful for the PW community words seem inadequate to express it, so just simply THANKS!
JannKinz
Or for energy (barely contained) within a structure try this one…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bEmJW2sOUs&feature=related
In one of my favorite movies of all time, THE LITTLE RICHARD STORY by William Klein, one of Richard’s entourage, maybe a manager says, “Little Richard weren’t no bisexuall, he wasn’t a homosexual, but he’s a FREAK!”
I always pictured Dionysus a bit more like this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HksYXbyPKk&feature=related
Morrison seems so spaced out…
Whatever prevents the soul’s expression, the widening and deepening of awareness and love, becomes a source of pain.
———————————————-
I would like to elaborate on this question of pain a little.
Statements like the one I’ve cut and paste above always run the risk of being appropriated as a fixed ideology that can lose sight of the processes involved, becoming instead (for some) like a mantra. A parallel would be the Christian doctrine of love – that becomes a sort of trump card to subvert all ‘lesser’ realities and dismiss concrete problems with a panacea prescription.
Of course, pain itself can prevent the soul’s fullest expression and so what seems important to notice is how pain processes and healing processes work out.
Sometimes we have to work through the messy stuff in a rather more public way than we would necessarily prefer! And this cannot be healthfully removed from the soul evolution equation. This means dealing with considerable karma-loads of guilt and fear about how our pain will be received – not necessarily by those who love us but by those we suspect may be looking for excuses not to love us, rather to ‘weird us out’.
This is where the broader chart for today brings more to bear on the outworking processes:
The moon is conjunct Venus in Aquarius (precisely this public space we worry about ventilating in). Both are in a square to Saturn in Libra (Libra ruled by Venus of course and Capricorn ruled by Saturn). The connection is hard to ignore.
Saturn as the very bones of the bodily structure, with an evolution of embodiment through this form in view through Sun/Pluto in Capricorn, remains in square to moon/Venus (due to moon’s large orb) in Aquarius. Is this not an expression of the tension between the physical/fleshy body and the emotional body?
Can you locate your pain? Is it manifesting in your body? (especially muscles/bones) Is it manifesting as a sense of world-weariness? Do you struggle to share your sense of pain and its contours among your peers? Is there guilt and karmic payload blocking your release?
You will be glad to know that Saturn is also trine both Neptune and Chiron.
Here is a resolution point for the expression of your pain. You have to go deeper.. into the bowels of your connection with those to whom you are deeply attuned in this life; with whom you can let go safely of any sense of inauthentic selfhood and simply be *accepted*. Can you do that? Do you feel that as a risk?
If so, examine why.. carefully. What you discover may surprise you.
They say ‘better out than in’. So here is the chance.. A crossroads in this project of evolution. Can you let go, not just internally but externally?
The emotional body hopes that you will.. so clearing away the junk (distractions) in preparation for a monumental year ahead.
Profound. Sets the path for 2012, in a beautiful and uplifting way. Thank you 🙂
He was gorgeous, in so many lovely ways.
How about the guitar player, complete with his blackened left eye? I wonder what the story was. Bursting out and all.
This so accurately describes where I’m at right now. Not an easy place to be, but made easier thanks to this wonderful blog. Thank you so very much dear ones! xxx