Midlife Transits

You’re moving into a period when job and family will wrestle for your attention. Or, more accurately, career and domestic concerns in general will tug at you. The conflict is not unmanageable though, and, in general, your career should get more preference for the time being. Scorpios who do mental or intellectual work will find November to be particularly intense, as will Scorpios with 3rd house occupations, such as secretary, writer, PR, communications, transportation, knowledge workers, and other occupations related to Mercury. (You can look at my other website Practical Astrology for more keywords related to Mercury and the 3rd house. Scroll down for keywords.)

It is likely that you will be quite busy and you may feel that you do not have time for everything you have to do this month. When stresses get to be a bit much, use your home as your retreat; it is your place of healing these days. Doing chores around the house can help you unwind.

Of course, this is your birthday month and time for a party. Fortunately, you have better astrological support for a good time this year than you have since 2007, as grumpy Saturn has moved out of your solar house of friendships and socializing. Your birthday wish new moon is on the 16th.

Your Scorpio year ahead looks to be full of changes, as we have many more planetary shifts than normal, as well as heavy-duty outer planet influences to shake us all up and make our lives interesting. You’ll want to check back often during the year for your current horoscopes, for if there’s ever a year in which we could use a roadmap, the next 12 months are likely to qualify for that distinction.

Take care and enjoy your birthday celebrations!

Pluto in Capricorn kicks up a fuss with Saturn in Libra this November. Pluto’s in your house of career and visibility, and it’s possible he will try to drive you into the ground with heavy career demands that will take time away from the serious relationships in your life. Thank goodness your health is scheduled to be improving thanks to Saturn finally getting his butt out of your health house. Don’t take chances, though, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, as do exercise, adequate sleep if you can get it, and proactive stress management.

You’re more likely to get your exercise this month if you are doing something fun that will let you burn off tension. No dreary rounds of running the treadmill at the gym this month. Get out there and play if you can. Another form of stress relief can come through contemplating the big ideas for long-term goals and healing the planet and being all idealistic that your chart is still nurturing for you. The current month may be stressful, but if you understand that you are on a journey that is leading somewhere significant, it will help you put things in perspective.

On another note, this is the month when you may get an excellent idea for dealing with marital finances, debts, expenses, obligations and all that other financial stuff that’s so important. Put your thinking cap on!

This is the time of year when your relationships vie with your career for attention. The middle of the month is just jam-spanking packed with aspects that pit one area of life against another. This year, it’s not just the traditional relationship/career duality that’s on the schedule. No, this year, we’ve also got Pluto in your long-term plans sector baring his knuckles at Libra in your job sector. All of which brings up the questions: Do you hate your job, love your job, both, or you’re so confused you can’t tell anymore? What are you going to do about the situation? Contemplating that ought to keep you busy enough.

As far as the relationships go, this is the time of year when your relationship-oriented sign is traditionally scheduled to set relationship goals. Great idea, especially if you do so before the 10th of the month, before all the aspect craziness really gets going. Financial goals can be set from the 22nd on. Astrologically speaking, the best goals are those that have to do with things like saving, getting out of debt or staying out of debt.

Health month for Gemini! The sun’s in Scorpio, your health sign. Time to eat those fruits and vegetables, get your annual checkups done, and all that jazz.

It’s also relationship month, starting on the 16th, when your ruler moves into your relationship sign of Sagittarius. We’re talking exclusive, committed relationships here, not casual dating relationships. Nope, the dating relationship sector of your is a whole nother story. In fact, your solar chart is now firmly opposed to casual relationships and it may start pushing you toward marriage, even if you don’t want to be pushed. Saturn is taking your relationships very seriously these days and this is NOT the month to be caught playing around on your girlfriend or boyfriend. Trust me on that.

Another possibility is that you will have some fairly serious matter to deal with regarding your children. Saturn in your 5th house of children is squaring Pluto in the middle of the month, and that’s a stressful aspect. Fortunately, things are better by Thanksgiving, and you should enjoy your holiday.

Okay, let’s start off with the good stuff in what’s overall a rather weird and overloaded astrological month. The sun’s in your job and health sector from the 22nd on. No issues there. In fact, it’s a good time to start healthy new habits to keep from gaining weight during the holidays. (Tip: Eat an apple before heading out to a holiday party. It’s very filling and reduces the urge to munch on everything in sight.)

Speaking of parties, there’s a full moon in your party sector on November 2nd. No issues there. You could host one yourself in fact.

No, it’s right around the middle of the month when everything gets wacko. There’s a new moon in your solar house of falling in love on the 16th, but it’s surrounded by confusing, surprising and downright ugly aspects. It is impossible to say how this will affect your particular situation, but issues are scheduled to arise. In fact, if any sign is likely to be affected by all that’s going on, it’s yours, as you are a cardinal water sign.

There’s a fight between planets in cardinal signs (Pluto in Capricorn and Saturn in Libra) and a happy trine between planets in water signs (sun in Scorpio and Uranus in Pisces). Not only that, Neptune, Jupiter and Chiron in Aquarius have to square the Scorpio planets, just to make everything more unpredictable. It’s like the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible.

That’s why we’re looking forward to that November 22nd date, when the sun moves into Sagittarius. Things will mostly calm down by then. Mostly.

November starts out with a full moon in your career house that you can use to boost visibility if you want, but the real action of the month is in your solar 1st, 3rd, 4th and 6th houses. Mars in your first house burns hot and urges you to put yourself forward. It’ll keep urging until early June so pace yourself, but don’t hold back.

Saturn is in your 3rd house for its first full month of the transit through Libra.  The third house is the house of relatives like brothers and sisters, and, for some reason, this area of your life is in conflict with Pluto in your job sector. I don’t know if this means you will be working when your siblings think you should be attending to family matters, but it’s not out of the question. The sun in Scorpio is transiting the sector of your chart that deals with your family of origin, and the aspects are kind of muddy there, so maybe something’s going on that you need to deal with.

The new moon in Scorpio takes place on November 16, and it occurs right in the middle of all the wacky aspects of the month. If your family life does not prove to be contentious, perhaps you will simply need to attend to some matters around the home. Of course, there are lots of other possibilities for this rather contrary month. Saturn in the 3rd could mean that you are doing a lot of reading or studying and that this somehow conflicts with your job duties.

For more possibilities, you might want to visit my other website Practical Astrology and look at the keywords for the houses listed above, as well as the planets Mars, Saturn, and Pluto. (Pluto’s the one in your 6th house.)

New moon in your 3rd house of reading, writing, and arithmetic this month, Virgo, on the 16th. If you’re a book-loving Virgo, haul out the reading list and indulge. Exercising your active brain may be more important than you realize in November, as wacky and difficult aspects make a retreat into the mind an appealing way to cope.

First, the pleasant stuff. Venus in Libra from October 14 through November 8 may tempt you to spend money socializing. Go ahead and splurge a little, because there’s not much splurging ahead for your sign over the next few years.

On the 22nd, the sun moves into the sector of your chart that deals with home and hearth, just in time for the holiday season to begin. In fact, Thanksgiving may be the best day of the month as warm-hearted Mars in Leo teams up with Mercury in Sagittarius to make things merry and bright for a family get-together.

It’s that middle period, between the 9th and the 22nd when you may want to grab that book and hide.

Cardinal people are scheduled to go a little nuts, or at least exhibits sign of stress (Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn are cardinal signs). Fixed sign people are scheduled to get all confused and weird (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius are fixed signs). All at the same time. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of people who won’t accidentally be trying to fry their relationships under the influence of quarreling skies.

Another possibility is that there will be some sort of event that affects a great deal of people at once, and they won’t be happy about it. Hopefully nothing too upsetting will happen, but still, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a mental note that snuggling under the covers with a flashlight and a novel may not be the worst way to spend the week of the 15th.

There’s a lot of activity in your solar 2nd house in November, which is normally a very productive house, one concerned with your material welfare. But don’t count on getting a whole lot done this month, cuz the skies just aren’t up for it. Instead, you will probably just be dealing with whatever you have to, since things are scheduled to to come to something of a head this month.

For example, something in your residence is apparently going to need serious attention, perhaps even complicated repairs. You may learn a lot about plumbing that you wish you didn’t need to know. If your residence isn’t affected, a family matter may come to a head.

The aspect causing all the trouble is Pluto in Capricorn squaring Saturn in your own sign. Since this very stressful aspect hits your sign directly, I’m going to urge you to be careful and to protect yourself throughout the month. There may be no actual danger associated with this aspect but Saturn rules fear and that means, naturally enough, that you might feel scared. You may be worried about how you’re going to pay for everything, about liability and legal issues if your water heater explodes and your neighbor’s prize petunias get flooded, or just alarmed by the general nastiness this aspect may provoke in the general population.

The aspect is exact on the 15th, but you may well be dealing the consequences beyond that date. It’s actually the first in a series of squares that goes through August 2010 (next one is at the end of January). Fortunately, Mercury moves into optimistic Sagittarius on the 16th, so you’ll have your wits about you and will be able to deal with things in a positive manner.

Energy moves into your sign this month, yay! Mercury enters on the 16th and the sun on the 22nd. Your sign is associated with enthusiasm, foresight, and last but not least, the holiday season. By the end of the month, you’ll probably be having lots of family contact, including contacts with siblings, cousins, and other relatives. By the beginning of next month, a major residential matter is scheduled to turn a corner. Things will be falling into place and you’ll start feeling productive and achievement-oriented as soon as you get a dose of energy in your sign.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The month starts out well with Venus in Libra in the sector that governs your social life. Venus actually enters this sector on October 14 and stays until November 8. Fun times. After that, all of society sort of falls apart or gets into a screaming match with itself (we’ve seen a bit of that already this year, haven’t we?). You may find yourself having to educate yourself on the issues of the day, because many people will apparently be upset about them.

The madness and mayhem continue right up until Mercury enters your sign and your Sagittarian optimism brings a ray of hope to the beleaguered. The major aspect in question involves Pluto in Capricorn (in your 2nd house of finances) squaring off with Saturn in Libra (in your 11th house of society at large). The signs most directly affected will be Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn. Maybe you’ll want to hide in your bedroom until the storm blows over or maybe you’ll want to participate in cheering up your friends in these signs until they get a grip on things. Your choice.

November is a heavy month, Capricorn, going from major planetary activity to your traditional season of withdrawal and the need for quiet time. The month starts out pleasantly enough with Venus in Libra wrapping up a tour of your 10th house of career  (Venus is in this sign from October 14 to November 8). Expect to be visible and even popular throughout the month, as Venus moves from Libra into Scorpio and your house of popularity for the rest of November. The Thanksgiving weekend may see your phone ringing off the hook, or alternatively, you may be the one reaching out to others.

Scorpio is also the sign that represents your hopes and wishes, and your wishing new moon occurs on the 16th. You may need it by then, though, because the day prior Pluto in your sign will have been in exact square to Saturn. To be blunt, this is a rather scary aspect, as it makes you examine yourself in the kind of deep and thorough way that most of us spend our lives avoiding. What’s truly important in life tends to come into focus during these major aspects, and what’s truly important is almost never the stuff we start out thinking it is.

As it so happens, Mars will be in your Pluto-ruled 8th house, and he may persuade you that you need physical or psychological healing. Wouldn’t be a bad time to enter a short course of therapy to reinforce your insights. I’ll put it another way, Cap. Saturn in Virgo has spent the last couple of years trying to get you all wise and stuff so that you could take your place in society in a visible and important way. This is the month when you need to call upon that wisdom.

As for the rest and withdrawal, the need for that will start as soon as that wishing new moon passes. Take a break, you will deserve it.

Career and visibility month! This is the time in the annual cycle of your solar chart when you are intended to be highly active in pushing yourself forward to the front of the career or visibility line. It’s quite the hopping month, too, from an astrological standpoint, and things don’t really slow down for your chart until early December or so.

So, regarding career–grasp all the clarity you can regarding your career when Venus moves into Scorpio (your career sign) on the 8th and then sproing into action. Venus will be your best friend for the rest of the month, although she will be  getting bushwacked by all the other annoying planets in the sky this month.

One such annoying planet is Mars, which will start out the month squaring Mercury in Scorpio and being all grumpy about your career thoughts. Then there’s the full moon in Taurus on the 2nd. This full moon falls in your family sector, so your mother or some other family member may need your attention then. The full moon’s a bit grumpy, too, although not fatally so.

Then there’s Jupiter in your own sign, normally friendly and optimistic, who is a bit dismayed to discover all the planetary activity in Scorpio cutting into his fun time. The grumpiest planet of all though is Saturn, who is somewhat grumpy during the best of months, but who is in a really sour mood with Pluto from about the 9th through I don’t know, maybe the 22nd, depending on how sensitive you are to these things. The thing to remember throughout this month is that Saturn is not mad at you–he’s mad at Pluto.

Nobody’s mad at you, actually, even if they pretend to be.They’re mad that the skies are all misaligned and going through earthquake-y type adjustments. Everybody loves you actually.  And the nicer you can be to all your many friends and acquaintances during their trying times, the more they will love you. Pick up the phone and comfort someone, even if they’re too disgruntled to say thank you. A little good karma never hurt anyone.

November’s a pretty active month astrologically, but first priority is channeling your energy into constructive activities on the job. The best thing you’ve got going for you all month is an optimistic combination of job and career energies. This is most prominent at the end of the month, but there is strong energy in your job sector all month long. Even better, Jupiter in Aquarius is now zooming direct, which should have the effect of brightening your outlook on life.

Watch out that Jupiter doesn’t encourage you to bite off more than you can chew the week of the 8th, when it squares the sun and Mercury. Jupiter is the least of anyone’s problems this month, though. The big problem comes from Saturn in your 8th house of joint finances and debt, because it will be squaring off with Pluto in Capricorn in your solar 11th house. This is the kind of big deal major aspect that can be associated with large-scale events that affect society at large. Not always, but it can be.

We’ve seen a bunch of those here lately, what with global economic meltdowns, health care screaming matches, historic elections, and generally interesting but unsettling times. Since this hits one of your financial houses, you want to keep your butt covered by excelling on the job. No need to put yourself at risk if your corporation undergoes a fit of downsizing. The aspect itself is exact on November 15, but you should figure that the tense energies could be in play from the week of 8th through the end of the month. Stay positive, and you should be able to remain on top of things in a proactive manner.

Lynn Hayes, astrology blogger at Beliefnet.com posted a link to a website that lists birth dates for Richard Heene and Mayumi Heene (aka parents of ‘balloon boy’). Nothing in particular struck my attention about these dates except that both are currently experiencing sextiles from Uranus in Pisces to planets in Capricorn. Mrs. Heene is also undergoing a prolonged square from transiting Jupiter to her Neptune in Scorpio.

Balloon boy dad is getting all the press for being the mad scientist behind the alleged hoax, which he may well be, but it is Jupiter square Neptune that’s a more noticeable symbol for being off one’s rocker, at least temporarily. Jupiter square Neptune is the type of transit that can tell you — ‘hey,  you know what would be economically beneficial? A big fat lie! What could possibly go wrong? You’ll never get caught because this harebrained scheme is sure to be successful!’

Occasionally I get the feeling that these planets actually enjoy taunting mere mortals, and that they sit back in the sky, clutching their sides and ho-ho-ho-ing when one of us takes the bait.

Be that as it may, it is the Uranus sextiles that are my subject. If the birth dates on the website are correct (they may not be), then Uranus in Pisces is sextiling Mr. Heene’s Saturn in Capricorn and Mrs. Heene’s Mars in Capricorn.

Uranus has been in Pisces for a good long time now and it’s taken me what seems like forever to reluctantly acknowledge that sextiles from Uranus in Pisces seem to be a real bitch. I started suspecting this a number of years ago when people would mysteriously contact me right around the time a Uranus sextile was exact upset about something that had gone wrong.

Uranus conjunctions didn’t seem to be any better quite frankly. Now that might be understandable; Uranus conjunctions can be hard to handle. But a little sextile–the opportunity angle?

Except that with Uranus in Pisces, it seemed to signal an opportunity for something to go unexpectedly wrong. To take a sudden turn for the worse. For the house to flood, the boyfriend to call with bad news, the affair to be revealed, the check to bounce.

I’m beginning to wonder if Uranus in Pisces has done anyone any favors these past few years. Surely it has, right? I must have a skewed sample. Right?

Just because a couple of people involved in a wacky news event seem to have been undergoing Uranus sextiles doesn’t mean this normally harmless little angle is the spawn of the devil when Uranus in Pisces gets ahold of it. Does it?

If you know you’ve undergone a transit from Uranus in Pisces, leave a comment detailing the wonderful things it did for you and save the reputation of this unjustly maligned transit.

Or–leave a comment confirming that Uranus in Pisces in transit has been useless at best and at worst a sign that something is about to get all messed up.

Tell me what you think.

Today I want to refer you to an excellent post by Donna Cunningham on Mars/Neptune and the recent deaths of 2 people (and the illnesses of many more) who participated in a “Spiritual Warrior” program run by James Arthur Ray, a man perhaps best known for his association with “The Secret.” The people died as a result of being in what was labeled a sweat lodge but what was apparently a concoction of Ray himself, one utilizing extreme heat in ways not generally used by those who organize a more traditional sweat lodge ceremony.

Cunningham talks specifically about Mars and Neptune in her post, and I have to admit ‘Neptune aspects’ was my first thought when I thought about what Ray’s birth chart might look like. It turns out that Ray’s chart (accurate birth time not known) also contains a Mars/Uranus square.

In my own personal experience, if you want to be associated with sudden, surprising and bad accidents, the Uranus/Mars square is one you want to seek out. It turns out that Ray’s previous ’sweat lodge’ events have been associated with bad events in the past, although not on this scale.

The chart for the event itself also contains a wide Uranus/Pluto square (out of sign), and it is these wide squares that I see most commonly in events that affect many people.

But it would be foolish to say that any time these squares show up bad things will happen. Billions of people got through that day without any untoward events. While such squares may show up in after the fact analysis, they are not predictive.

The presence of Neptune aspects isn’t predictive either, although I’ll take a few words to weigh in on the planet of delusion at this point. The thing about Neptune is that he is the planet of transcending limits. In this respect, he is otherworldly, because real life (something Neptune is not fond of, real life) is full of limits.

Overly Neptunian people have a devil of a time reconciling themselves to this. They just do not want to believe it. It seems incomprehensible and illogical to them. If the mind can do many things, they reason, why can’t it do everything? Why acknowledge the existence of anything else?

These people want to live in a world of imagination, in which many of the normal limits do not apply. Sometimes they twist reality around so violently that they turn very real limits (e.g., the amount of time a body can go without being properly rehydrated) into irrelevancies in their own minds.

And then innocent people pay the price.

You could say it is the insanity of Neptune that makes Saturn so necessary. Saturn gets a bad rap because he insists on facing limits, getting grounded in reality, and understanding that suffering is a legitimate and appropriate response to many of the conditions of the real world.

The problem with Neptune is that it does not want to accept the legitimacy of ordinary human suffering. It attempts to escape it, transcend it, ignore it, deny it, and spin it into something entirely different.

Hence, we get Ray purportedly saying to his followers that the people who died attracted their deaths to themselves. No need to grieve, mourn, suffer, contemplate, acknowledge responsibility or limits. It’s a happy thing and we can all escape the legitimate sorrow that should accompany such an event by pretending that the deaths were the fault of the people who died. No one dies unless they want to. There are no tragedies, no accidents, and no evil in the Neptunian world. Just magical thoughts and magical outcomes that have no use for the reality that everyone else has to live in.

I could get real cynical at this point and say that the people who died did indeed attract their own deaths by signing up for a g*dd*mn scam by a semi-cult leader preaching bullsh*t. Their Saturns didn’t tell them to get the hell out of the tent and scram before something went horribly wrong. Or I could say that pushing responsibility for the deaths on the people who died is a strangely insidious and Neptunian form of evil. Perhaps I will get real cynical as my own personal buttons get pushed by this story.

But that would be mean, so perhaps I’ll just run a PSA from Saturn:

Hi folks, Saturn here. Remember that reality is a beautiful thing no matter how much you may not like it at any given moment. You don’t need to run around trying to think magical thoughts in order to get around its existence. You just have to respect it.

You don’t need to be attracting wealth all the time, turning your critical thinking faculties over to a guru, or believing that there’s some secret that will make life wonderful all the time if you just think the right things. Because it isn’t wonderful all the time. That’s what makes the times when it is wonderful so incredibly precious. Seriously.

So, as the official planetary sponsor of reality, I just want to remind you to be grateful for me occasionally. I may not talk as pretty as Neptune, but I am your friend. Really.