By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
The essential purpose of astrology…is not so much to tell us what we will meet on our road, as it is to suggest how to meet it – and the basic reason for the meeting.
— Dane Rudhyar
The Uranus/Pluto conjunction* of the 1960s was, indeed, a decade of social transformation. At the time, I was too new at living to understand it as anything but the exuberance of youth. 1960 was my first year in high school, while New Year’s Eve of 1969 found me too close to delivering my second child to go out celebrating. When I think back on all that I experienced in that decade — both personal and political — I wonder how so much could possibly be packed into a day, let alone a tumultuous stretch of social growth that gave us a renaissance of love and sexual freedom, pock-marked with violence, assassination and eventual disillusionment.
All the experiential messages sent to that younger self insisted that unrest and turmoil was how life looked, exciting and unpredictable, exhilarating and dangerous. My romance with the early peace movement in San Francisco was ignited by the resurgence of folk music, preferred by Beatniks and writ large in Berkeley’s coffee houses; a Petrie dish for what came to be known as “the counterculture.”
The agitation and activism on the Berkeley campus was orchestrated to televised news of Dr. King’s marches, dogs snarling and snapping, blood running in southern streets. Peace and justice became a phrase; not separate words, one not possible without the other. Civil disobedience became the prerequisite to changing the static absolutes of a government unwilling to flex; it still is.
By the Summer of Love, I was looking for answers to life’s larger questions. Suddenly in touch with my own mortality after my first baby was born, the gang-style murder of an ex-boyfriend in the Haight Ashbury sent me off on a quest for spiritual answers, heavy on Eastern thought. In those days, information was scarce. The most accessible astrological instruction was through the Rosicrucians, who offered a course by mail.