Midlife Transits

“Fear is afoot everywhere, and polarization prevails. Faith in institutions – corporations, government, the media – is down. Americans are angry, and they long ago grew accustomed to expecting the resolution of problems in very short order, even if reality rarely works that way.”
–From an AP story on the oil spill, dated May 30, 2010

BP Oil Spill, Part 2: In which we learn that yelling at someone to do something does not actually get something done.

The BP oil leak catastrophe started under the astrological influence of Pisces and Virgo. On May 27, Uranus moved into Aries and astrological phase 2 began. By June 6, Jupiter had also moved into Aries for a conjunction with Uranus. This shift was good in the sense that getting Uranus and Jupiter out of the sign ruling oil coincided with BP finally being able to contain some of the leak. On the other hand, Jupiter hadn’t stopped making the size of the leak bigger, at least officially. As of this writing, the official estimates of the leak size have ballooned enormously, taking an incomprehensible disaster and making it an enormously incomprehensible disaster.

The other thing the Aries energy has done is present a stark case for the ineffectiveness of yelling. Although the leak technically began under Pisces influence, Aries anger was butting up against this situation from the beginning. Aries is a cardinal sign, and cardinal signs feel entitled, maybe even obligated, to tell other people what to do. Pluto in Capricorn has cardinal energy too.

So the cardinal energy trotted into action when it got wind of this disaster, following its primal orders, and promptly learned what the clash of cardinal energy accomplishes. Nothing.

The President of the United States got angry and supposedly told BP to just ‘plug the damn hole.’ It turned out that when the purportedly most powerful man in the world yells at a corporation to do something, that doesn’t mean it gets done.

That little burst of presidential temper was only the beginning of the yelling, though. The public has yelled at BP. The public has yelled at the government. The government has yelled at the government. BP has yelled at journalists to get out. The government has yelled at journalists to get out. Journalists have channeled the yelling of others into various media outlets to feed it back to BP and the government. Commentators have called this a war. Ordinary people have yelled about the situation to no one in particular. Individuals gather on Facebook to yell or post videos of themselves on YouTube to yell. Congresspeople have yelled at whoever they can think of to yell at and will be hauling in more BP people to yell at momentarily.

Everybody’s the boss and no one’s in charge. Literally. There are swarms of government agencies and BP divisions and local government representatives swirling around the affected areas and all of them, apparently, have the power to block action, to pull the boss card. And no one’s in charge.

Getting things done takes cooperation. This is what Aries and Capricorn energies forget, in their mania for taking charge of things they can’t control.Too many bosses spoil anything.

Meanwhile, Jupiter in Aries energy brings out multitudes of enterprising individuals who want to be helpful. That’s the good part of Aries. It takes the initiative. It wants to help. Uranus in Aries brings forth all kinds of people with innovative and creative technical solutions to offer, some of them probably Uranian crazy, but all of them clamoring for attention. And yet these people get nowhere but on a fast train to Frustrationville as overwhelming corporate and government power try clamp the Plutonian lid on all that uncontrolled energy.

The astrological themes jostle against each other like symbols playing bumper cars. Pluto: power,  control, secrecy, wealth, conspiracies, resources, the underworld, cynicism. Capricorn: corporations, government, fear, delays, bureaucracy, reality, problems, bossiness, stonewalling. Aries: anger, initiative, drive, bossiness, energy, impulsiveness, hurry, impatience, individuals. Uranus: speed, technology, disruption, innovation, mass media, creativity, shortcuts, revolution, protests, the people en masse. Jupiter: generosity, expansion, optimism, catalyst. Squares: frustration, obstacles, problems, polarization, action.

It’s as if the universe threw a bunch of competing energies in a pot and gave them no one way to do anything but boil over.

That’s in the public arena, but I see this all around me in the lives of ordinary people. The impulse to tell other people what they ought to be doing is strong. The remembrance that telling other people what to do does not make them do it is not as strong. Frustration ensues. It seems clear what ought to be done, but no one else is playing along nicely. In our own lives, it can get easy to be at loggerheads and therefore in a logjam. The good news in all this is that it sometimes takes a logjam to get a person to become ready and willing to deal with underlying problems.

The bad news is that almost no one likes a logjam. It’s not fun to have planets challenge Pluto and point out to us that what we think we ought to have under control–isn’t necessarily something that we actually can control. It’s a wake-up call that other people have their own agendas, and their agendas count too. Aries is a sign that likes to think it’s right about everything. When Aries planets are under assault, we learn that thinking we are right is not exactly the same thing as actually being right.

As July gets going, Jupiter in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn will officially square off. By the 3rd week of July, Saturn will officially enter Libra and start playing the cooperation card. It’s scheduled to get mighty ticked at all the people who won’t sit down, shut up, and listen for a second. It will try to put the brakes on spontaneous anger as it opposes Uranus in Aries and then in August briefly squares Pluto. Saturn will have his work cut out for him, and there’s little to no chance he’ll be able to calm everyone down. But perhaps it’s important he try.

By late August, the dispute energy will slowly start to recede. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that all along the prediction has been that the oil leak won’t really be plugged until August. In the meantime, we’re all going to have to remember to breathe. Personally and collectively, we’ve been through stuff before. We’ll get through this. It may take us awhile to sort through what we learn, but we will get through it.

And in the end, we’ll all hopefully come out a little wiser.

“How did we get into this mess?”

That’s the question a friend asked me the other day, and it’s a question that’s generally applicable to astrology of this summer. Most of the outer planets seem to be asking, with something greater than exasperation, ‘how the bleep did we get into this mess?’ Although the Gulf oil spill is the largest and most visible symbol of the disarray in the skies, many of us have felt the energy in personal ways. Let’s take a look at what’s been happening using the BP oil leak as a guide.

On April 20, 2010 an oil rig known as the Deepwater Horizon located in the Gulf of Mexico exploded. At the time, Uranus in Pisces was opposing Saturn in Virgo. Neptune was lurking about in an inconjunct with Saturn. Jupiter in Pisces was hovering near Uranus, ready to pounce. Pluto in Capricorn was stationed ominously in a wide out of sign square to both Uranus and Saturn.

In the symbolic language of astrology, the events that followed have tragically been almost literal at times.  Uranus is Mr. Explosion, especially when he’s in a bad mood with other outer planets, as he was at the time. Hem in Uranus with constricting energies from other planets and all hell breaks loose. Uranus was in the sign of oil and the sign of the sea. Oil-related explosion at sea. Pretty literal.

Saturn is Mr. Safety and Mr. Let’s Do Things Carefully. In Virgo, he was in a sign related to workers, the environment and environmental regulation. Uranus beats Saturn in a fair fight, and even in an unfair fight. Uranus’s oil-related explosion at sea annihilated Saturn’s relatively weaker efforts to safeguard workers, the environment, to champion prudence and doing things right.

Uranus also relates to speed and technology. Pisces is also the sign of chaos, uncertainty, and ‘we don’t know what the hell we are doing.’ Saturn also relates to cost-cutting, delays, slowness, old ways of doing things, and the desire for order and procedure. BP’s demands for speedy drilling, combined with cost-cutting efforts, previous delays, and new technology for deep water drilling collided to create a swirling marine nightmare of chaos, uncertainty, and environmental degradation mixed with a desperate desire to get control of the leak using Saturn’s old-fashioned methods of procedure. Saturn’s reliance on precision Virgo-like engineering efforts was no match for Uranus’s burbling, gurgling torrent of oil spilling from underground.

In the stark mathematics of the universe at the time, the raw energy of chaos beat the pants off little ant-like human efforts to contain it. BP and everyone else responding to the disaster were in over their heads, not knowing what the hell they were doing, having unleashed a Pandora’s box of forces they were unable to control.

Neptune in Aquarius, the planet also associated with the sea and oil, in an unsupportive angle to Saturn, stood off to the side and said ‘I told you so. I told you were placing too much faith (Neptune) in new technology (Aquarius) for deep water drilling.’ Jupiter, the Great Expander, also in the sign of oil and the sea, piled on to make the disaster bigger and bigger and bigger with every passing day, vowing to continue until everyone got the message that things were out of control.

Pluto in Capricorn, symbol of wealth, corporations, and the riches of the deep, anchors the situation from his square position off to the side of the disaster, saying nothing. He doesn’t have to say anything. In Pluto’s world, the rules are obvious and brutal. You reap what you sow. Screw up and pay the price.

No one can accept this really, at least not quickly. The price is too high, too unexpected, too lingering. Pluto lessons are hard to absorb, and with Uranus and Jupiter upping the emotional ante, the hubbub surrounding the chaos makes it hard to identify reality. Even the size of the leak remained elusive, slippery, uncertain.

It would be way too much of a stretch to say that each individual one of us is in the same position with the regard to the universe–battling chaos, uncertainty, misplaced faith, and forces beyond our control. Not every single individual is saying ‘how did we/I get into this mess?’ But collectively, we are in a mess. Collectively, we have gotten in over our heads.

Collectively, we don’t know what we are doing. At the time of the initial explosions, no one in the entire world actually knew how to stop that gusher in a timely manner. No one.

We had pushed beyond our Saturn limits into uncharted territory.

Uranus and Pluto and Jupiter and Neptune and Saturn don’t line themselves up for disaster just for their own amusement, although it may seem that way at the time. They align themselves these ways because the alignments simply reflect the truth. If you get in over your head, unleash forces you don’t understand how to harness, you will experience harrowing consequences. The alignments bring to our attention the times when we have to up our game.

The simple truth, I suppose, is that we got into this mess as a result of choices we made earlier. BP is paying for its choices. The government is paying for its choices. All of us are paying for our long-standing choices to favor new oil exploration and technology over boring old things like conservation and reduced consumption. And sort of like a rogue wave, Uranus’s ocean explosion is sweeping up and destroying a lot of people along the Gulf who are victims of circumstances they can’t control. These alignments are like that. They are absolutely, positively not fair.

On the other hand, these alignments also represent turning points and tipping points. Painfully and slowly, we get the message. We figure out that we have to do better. We stop putting up with problems that we should have addressed long ago. The tide turns. We go in a new direction because we have to. We stop letting Uranus in Pisces kick our collective butts and we eventually get to work, building a better system.

That’s the idea anyway. Let’s hope it happens.