January 08 |
January 2008 Forecast |
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New to astrology? Read on and ignore the technical bits. There's plenty here for you too! Why don’t I write horoscopes for each sign?
Even though we’re starting a new year, our thoughts will return to the last month of last year for many reasons as the future unfolds. The new beginnings have allowed us to see the future, even forced it upon us (as, for instance, in the case of the progressive movement in Pakistan). In comparison to December, this month is relatively uneventful, but what events occur are powerful enough. Those events come up at the end of the month. In the meantime, we can integrate the energies of December into our lives and prepare for the opportunities that begin to appear at month’s end. It’s Not Just the Fact That It’s January. December brought us no fewer than four new beginnings, with one of those the start of a 13-year cycle. By remembering this, we’ll be able to take maximum advantage of these energies by creating the right opportunities now. It’s not just the fact that we’re starting a new year: There’s something bigger going on. What’s more, so many of these changes took place in such a short time (12 days) that it was hard to assimilate them all as they occurred. Even now, we have the chance to process them, as the Moon and other planets make connections to bring them down to earth. If you’re like most people in the US, life tends to get put on hold during the holidays. We need the break in this breakneck culture. Still, we got a wake-up call from the 21st through the 26th. So January is the time to reconnoiter and figure out which path(s) to take. It’s not too late. Even with the shortest of the cycles (lasting one year), we have until early May at the latest to set our course. However, the most potent period is now. We have to balance the drive to act with blossoming awareness to create opportunity at the right time. Act too soon, and we may miss a better opportunity by narrowing our options too quickly. Act too late, and we miss the natural burst of growth that comes at the beginning of a cycle. When we’re talking about a growth cycle, we can remind ourselves of how a seed grows; much of its early growth is invisible. It doesn’t poke its head above ground until the roots are established. We get to work with the emerging awareness of what to launch for 1/4 the length of the cycle, but that doesn’t mean to be inactive during that time. It means exploring ideas, taking them out for a test drive, seeing what support you are getting from the universe and what feels right to you. Remember, even if we are only working with a one-year cycle, there’s a larger cycle in which the shorter period plays a part. Make sure that what you are putting your energy into is part of something you want to be involved in for at least several (if not many) years to come. Sometimes you just don’t know, especially if you’re dealing with Neptune. Then it’s time to keep exploring and expect that the directions you take will lead to the best path for you in the long run, even if that’s not clear now. It’s the time to chop wood and carry water. Time to Wake Up! Right away, on the 2nd, we get a wake-up call, when Mars meets Pluto from across the sky. This contact, an opposition, places Earth as piggy-in-the-middle. It’s the second time we’ve been there — the first was September 21. If you recall, this is about when the Hollywood writers strike began. When this came up in the news at that time, I knew it was going to be a drawn-out experience. I held out hope that some breakthrough would occur in the last week of December and the first week of January (as Mars makes its second contact with Pluto), and this is indeed the case. The independent producers (Worldwide Pants) of the Letterman show have reached an agreement with the writers guild, fully legitimizing their claims. If you recall, they want royalties and residuals from internet and other new media, on a par with what they get in other media now. This lends strength to the writers’ side, since at least one (independent) producer sees the claims as reasonable. While I’m sure this is disappointing to the rest of the writers out there, in the long run there is hope for their cause. This may not be resolved until near when Mars and Pluto connect for the third time, on March 7. There will be signs of life, however, starting around January 30. If you have activities that seem to tie in with this cycle, you may see your own situation improve at these times as well. Watch what happens around January 2 to get a glimpse of how things will be resolved. The interaction of Mars with Pluto and Jupiter was the powerful mix that coincided with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. (Watch for an article on this on my forum and blog.) How Well Are You Doing with Bringing Order Out of Chaos? If you’re feeling godlike (goddesslike) at all these days, you’ll enjoy your experiences the 6th – 12th. The two planets that perhaps relate most to those “I can create the universe” feelings are Saturn and Uranus. They will be connecting in November this year for the first of three times. If you haven’t got enough to worry about, you can always anticipate their connection (during Saturn’s next yearly cycle) by watching how you do when Venus contacts them on the 6th (Saturn) and 12th (Uranus). For now, I expect this will be a time for unearthing hidden factors in relationships. However, if we’re going to have a challenging flu season, it will be next year when Saturn and Uranus are “in the zone” with each other. I plan to keep an eye out for what viruses are doing during this week. I would expect there to be a cold or flu that “everyone” catches around this time, but if there’s an outbreak of bird flu, it may be the worst one yet and it may signal that it’s about to leap species. I don’t expect that whatever bug comes out in the season of 08–09 to be more virulent than that of 1918, but this is the closest we’ll come to a planetary pattern similar to that of 1918 (and the other flu pandemics) for a few years at least. (See my article, “Planetary Miasms: The Astrology of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic” for more information.) What Did You Dream in 2000? The economy could be in trouble right now with the real estate bust, and it would be evenworse if it weren’t that Jupiter and Saturn were making resonant noises together. They are in a pattern where they make 5 harmonious trine connections over the period between March 07 and November 08. (See Chart B.) Jupiter is associated with expansion and Saturn with contraction. Together these forces combine to generate the flux and flow of human activity in general and economy in particular. When they are in harmony, business and investment generally do well. They are not strong enough, however, to override the abuse of power that deregulation (particularly in the US) has brought about in the world of finance. This means that only certain segments of the economy will do well over this period, and they will be in slow-growth areas, not the extremes of speculation. The third of the trines occurs on January 21. Because we are in the opening half of Jupiter-Saturn’s 20-year cycle, we will experience encouragement and signs of growth in areas of enterprise in which we have already invested some time, effort, and training, but haven’t yet peaked in. The efforts that are building now were started around May 2000. This could feel very much like the inspiration we had for the start of a new millennium. Even in the 8 years since then, the world has changed in ways we could never have imagined. Still, there is something that you dreamed then that is under development and still relevant to the future. Whatever that is, it will receive a boost this year. You’ll see new signs of life in this area, encouragement to continue on, in spite of the obstacles you’ve encountered thus far. This is a good time to open yourself to what the universe has to say and trust it enough to follow the guidance it whispers in your ear. Listen around the 21st! Related events have or will occur on March 16 and May 6, 2007, as well as September 8 and November 21 of this year. Another Planetary Pile-Up As the end of the month approaches, we get another grouping of planetary events. The first may be subtle but it will be profound in the changes it signals: the movement of Pluto into Capricorn. To give you a sense of how momentous this is, Pluto has not been in Capricorn since 1778. The other two events, while substantial in our experience, are considerably less significant but will still be felt. Mercury enters another of its 3-week retrograde periods on the 28th, while Mars returns to forward motion on the 30th. Mars Leaves Center Stage. You may be tired by now of hearing me discuss Mars’s retrograde and our human responses to it. All the planets except the Sun and Moon exhibit apparent retrograde (backward) motion because of our position outside the center of the solar system (no planets appear to retrograde from the perspective of the Sun). The planets beyond Mars retrograde with mind-numbing regularity, once a year for 4-5 months. Mercury does so every four months for 22-24 days like clockwork. Venus and Mars, however, because they are closest in speed to Earth, do so least frequently and seem to wreak the most havoc in our lives due to the irregularity factor. (More correctly, of course, we wreak the havoc on ourselves.) When Mars returns to forward motion on the 30th, we can relegate our aggressive side to the usual repressed place it occupies, or we can recall the lessons we’ve learned about how to manage it better and carry them forward. For me, it’s been a time of developing better energy habits (excuse me if you’ve heard this before). Mars rules our fight-flight-freeze response, governed by the triple warmer meridian in Chinese medicine. Each meridian is part of a river of energy that runs up and down the body in a continuous loop, emerging and submerging as it distributes energy throughout the body according to the need. A meridian will draw energy as required for “special needs”. In the stressed-out world I used to live in, my triple warmer was depleting the other meridians all the time. It didn’t know that I didn’t need to be on high alert all the time. When it’s on high alert, it leaves all the other meridians empty, and eventually our health suffers. With my triple warmer on alert all the time, it gave me the feedback that the world was indeed a dangerous place. Since Mars began its retrograde, I’ve been retraining my triple warmer to reinterpret the world differently. It doesn’t need to rescue me all the time. It can relax and let the other meridians do their job too. I have learned to be more relaxed in many ways since Mars turned retrograde in mid-November. This has been an incredibly profound experience, even though Mars is not ordinarily a power player in how life unfolds. I still have a month to go in the repatterning of my energy system, and it’s going well. For me, I turned the corner on this new, good habit as Mars reached its opposition to the Sun and Pluto, at the halfway point in the cycle. Because Mars has been retrograde most of the time in Cancer, it pertains especially to our personal experience of life, especially on an emotional level. During its retrograde time in Gemini (which is now, the month of January), it deals with our personal experience on a mental level, especially how we communicate and receive/interpret communications from others. Healing Our Vision of the Future The potency of Mercury’s retrograde is measured by the power of the planets it contacts during its backward travel. During this retrograde, its primary contacts are with Chiron and Neptune. This is especially auspicious, because this year Chiron and Neptune will be conjoining themselves, and part of the power of their conjunction is the fact that they will be acting together in some instances. If Neptune is visionary and Chiron has to do with healing, then we will be healing our vision of the future. (Alternately, we could say that it’s about plugging the holes in our boat.) Mercury, messenger of the gods, will be bringing us the first messages of how this will be felt in our lives. Our first glimpses come before the retrograde begins: Mercury contacts Chiron on the 11th and Neptune on the 22nd. On these dates, we will be receiving signals about what Mercury will teach us and also about what the Chiron-Neptune conjunction is about in our lives. Mercury contacts Chiron again on February 7 and March 4. It connects with Neptune again on February 1 and March 8. By the end of this period, we’ll know much more about how to make our vision work in the world. We’ll experience a culmination of these energies on February 6, when the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Chiron, and Neptune come together in a cluster during the solar eclipse. While Chiron and Neptune have been in Aquarius, we’ve been learning that it is a combination of factors that leads to any given effect. This means that it is extremely difficult to ascertain what is at the heart of any problem. We may look at a situation and see a cause and say, “Yep, that’s it!” Then we set out to solve the problem and find that it has tentacles coming from other sources as well. We have to put enough focus and thought into finding the many causes of a situation in order to effectively eradicate it. If we take into account the many causes, a simple solution may exist. However, we won’t have the right simple solution if all the causes are not known and considered. This is certainly true in global warming, problems with the voting system, illegal immigration, and jihadism in any culture or religion. Pluto in Capricorn Brings New Rules. I could write a book on the transit of Pluto in Capricorn, and I will be writing an in-depth article on it during January. Here’s what I wrote about it in August: What will this bring? One way to assess this is to look at what happened when Pluto entered Capricorn in previous cycles. It did so in 1516 and 1762. Within a year of Pluto’s move into Capricorn (in 1517), Martin Luther posted his new rules for a more meaningful religious structure on the door of the Palast Church in Wittenberg, Germany, giving birth to the Reformation. In 1762, the concept of individual freedom was emerging as a concept through the writings and translations of Voltaire’s works, among others. So, what might happen now? What about the current corporatist trend in world governments? Seen in a certain light, the government provided by the Church in 1516 was corporatist, just as was the government of, say, England over its colonies in 1762. The most recent Pluto in Capricorn culminated in the American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions. Perhaps we need a similar revolution overturning the power that business has gained in controlling government while allowing greed to run amok. The revolution this time will be an economic one. There are several core changes (in my opinion) that need to be made: removing corporate personhood, removing corporate wealth from election campaigns, reimposing thoughtfully created trade tariffs (to temper globalization and manage the value of the dollar), and re-regulating the financial industry to protect the individual borrower. These would be pipe dreams if Pluto were not in Capricorn. As you can see from its past sojourns in the sign, real structural changes have been made, shaking the very foundations of culture. Who would have thought that the throat hold that the Catholic Church had on Europe would have been loosened by a single rebellious monk? Who would have thought that a few mavericks of the Enlightenment would have dreamed a new nation and stood up successfully to the most powerful nation then on the planet? These things are possible, and if such changes are brought about, they will go much better for everyone if those in control release their hold willingly. Although this is not universally likely, it is possible that other factors will spur such willingness — global warming, global instability and volatility, public health risks, to name a few. I want to be clear that this is a time of possibility. Pluto makes its ingress with Jupiter on its side. We need change, but gentle change. Knowing that what we think creates in its own right, if we focus as a group on a new cultural (world) consciousness, we may yet succeed in bringing about the changes that will save the planet and all its inhabitants. What Are You Inspired to Build? It’s helpful to know what part of your chart Pluto is in and what it will be contacting now and in the next 14 years that it will remain in Capricorn. However, even if you don’t know this, you will be able to tune in to its impact in your life, because we become visionary during a major planetary ingress. How and what do you want to transform? What do you feel inspired to build or create? What major undertaking are you drawn to? What do you burn to become? These are questions that are bubbling inside and will boil to the surface during 2008. You’ll have all year to feel into this energy, and you’ll have seven years to articulate your path, then seven years to express it. I will be writing MUCH more about Pluto in Capricorn this year and as its expression unfolds. Relationship Awareness Grows. We’ve had a bumpy road where relationships are concerned since August last year. Now, as Venus opposes Mars on the 19th, we will become aware of what we’ve been learning and what it really means in our relationship life. It will help us adjust to a new normal in our ways of connecting and our ties with others. The balance between partners wants to rectify itself now. If one person has substantially more power in a relationship than the other, a shift toward equilibrium wants to occur. It’s also a time of figuring out what we want. A Spectacular Sight I will mention it now and again in the next forecast: If you can get up early in the morning, you will see the breath-taking conjunction of Venus and Jupiter on February 1. It will be visible in the skies before and after this date, but this date will be their closest approach. They are the two brightest planets in the heavens. Although they are not at the brightest part of their cycle with the Sun, it will still be a sight to behold. This conjunction, which occurs once a year, is a positive portent for financial and relationship well-being if you can drink in the energy and use it in your life. Significant Planetary Events Mars and Saturn are retrograde. Mars is in detriment. Jupiter is in fall.
All dates are based on Pacific Time. |
