new year, new decade, new life
It’s a new day, a new year, a new decade in a next-to-new millennium, and I must be excited by this at a purely body level because I woke very early this morning (before dawn) despite going to be very late and have not been able to fall asleep again. I surrendered at last, and rose at 8:30 to consider this thing, this new thing I’m in, this new life.
This could be the beginning of something utterly unprecedented in my own life and in human history. Then again, it might be more of the same old, same old stuff on a greater scale. It’s entirely up to me and up to us on a macro / world / political level.
There is something coming up this year that astrologers have been calling the ‘Cardinal Climax’ and I’ve been talking about it to my astrology students for a few months now. It’s an opportunity for a profound new awakening, or perhaps disaster of epic proportions. Yikes!
The Cardinal Climax is a long-term cycle that began with Pluto’s entry into the cardinal earth sign Capricorn, back in 2008, and that signaled a global economic crisis and a collective wake-up around the planetary ecological / climate crisis. Capricorn represents the reality check, the place where the ground meets the falling object, the real bottom line. We’ve been struggling with that one for a while.
Most recently, Saturn (which, with an approximate 30-year cycle, moves much more quickly than creepy-crawly Pluto’s 240 years around the sun) moved into cardinal air Libra this autumn, squaring Pluto. Truth, justice, balance, retribution, struggle, and death and endings are the theme of the day. We are collectively immersed in this particular transit right now, and it’s a harsh one.
But the real kicker waits for late spring when Uranus (with an 80 year cycle) moves into cardinal fire, Aries. Aries is the first sign of the cycle and represents new beginnings, birth, and explosive emergence of life from the void. Uranus has been dissolved in the final stages of Pisces for a while now, and as it is the Awakener, the principle of sudden, shocking, unexpected change, its transit into Aries is bound to rock and roll us all.
The ruler of Aquarius, Uranus holds the potential for a rebirth of true loving global Heart, a new consciousness of connectedness and kinship among all life forms. It also holds the potential for global conflict of unprecedented proportions—a revolution that explodes in violence, an uprising against oppression and global tyranny.
We each have personal responsibility, which (hey, I’m an Aries ya know) means me. That’s right; I’m the one who can change the world. And so are you. We are each and all the one and only being responsible for our personal reality. Even if we feel powerless and victimized by all the Big Deals going on behind the scenes, somewhere in the back rooms of our own heads, our own personal sordid compromises and deals with the devil are our own place to start.
Until we clean up our own basements and back rooms and call on our own corporate leaders to clean up their acts (you know, stuff like health and finances and dietary / exercise change, walking our talk, being in integrity with ourselves, crying our tears and feeling our fears, facing our demons and recognizing their faces in our own mirrors, all that boring yet critically important crap), we don’t have a single leg to stand on when it comes to finger pointing ‘out there’.
We’re all living in a glass house this year, and it’s time to pull back the pointing finger and breathe our own breath, keep our own feet on the ground and stand up for what we personally require, giving what we are personally empowered to give, and see what changes from there.
We might be very, very surprised. Strike that: we are guaranteed a surprise, with Uranus’ movement into Aries, but the more personal responsibility we take for our own situations, the more we’re going to like the surprises we receive. The world is becoming ever more fractally complex, new and exciting, and who knows what waits down this shining highway?
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling positively upbeat about this coming climax. Oh yeah. It all starts with this breath, inhale, exhale, this body, muscles shifting and moving, this skin, sensing, touching, this heart, beating.
Nice. Happy New Year, new decade, new life to us all. And bright, grateful blessings to the year we have just been through. What a ride it was, with the full range of joy and trauma, as Saturn’s square to Pluto manifested in the death of our dear TemPeSt Gale. My photos in this article are from that terrible time, showing just how far behind I’ve gotten in blogging. That will change, or so I intend.
TemPeSt was killed on the day the Saturn-Pluto square was exact, providing Hornby Island (and possibly the world, for who knows what she could have become had she been allowed to blossom unplucked?) with a crisis of 9/11 proportions.
In fact, the last contact between Saturn and Pluto was back in 2001 when the opposition between Saturn in Gemini (the planet of buildings and financial authority in the sign of the twins) and Pluto in Sagittarius (the planet of deep, compressed emotions such as rage and terror in the sign of religious fanaticism and dogma) blew a hole in the world as we knew it.
It was a dark and terrible time, as the photos above illustrate, but as dark times do, it passed. The memories remain along with all the footage of her music and poetry, performance and vitality. In a sense, TemPeSt lives on in more than mere memory, for the internet and the technology of audio and video recordings keeps her alive and in our eyes and ears, as well as the she that will always live in our hearts.
2009 was a beautiful and potently positive year for me personally, aside from that hole blown in it in November. So many of my dreams and desires have come true, so many openings are flowering, I am deeply grateful for my life now.
Blessings to you all in this new year, new decade, new life. Blessed be to us all.
