Suncatchers and Families
In my previous newsletter I forgot to mention two important things:
The first is that I will be having “drop-by” studio hours, where anyone can stop in and ask questions, sign up for programs and activities, and also purchase the Suncatchers displayed in the front window.
The following hours will be valid through December 2011:
Fridays from 10-12 AM (beginning November 19th)
Tuesdays from 4:30 – 5:30 PM. (beginning November 23rd)
The second is that I wanted to tell the story behind the Suncatchers.
Created by my cousin, Dr. Bryn Collins, who is a psychotherapist living in Minneapolis, their significance goes far beyond just having some colorful, creative objects to brighten my store-front window.
They are for sale, so their purpose is not solely a decorative one – and they are great things to give as gifts, as each one is unique, and they are more than reasonably priced, as they run from $2.00 - $10.00.
But there is a story behind them that I feel is important to share, especially as we come up to the holidays and topics such as families become “hot”, as we all attempt to do our best to connect with our families and have meaningful time together.
When I was growing up, Bryn was the oldest of the cousins, so the age difference between us meant that we did not have a lot of close contact. When I was about 7 or 8, there was a falling out between our parents (her mother and my father were siblings), which meant that we saw even less of each other, only connecting during the usual weddings and funerals. She, then, took off for an adventurous life, and I only heard snippets about where she was and “who” she might be through my mother. At one point a book appeared that she had authored, and I remember thinking, wow, this woman is something else!! I admired her creativity, and her obvious drive to forge a life for herself that was anything but “conventional”. I recognized then that we were “kindred spirits” in a way, but had really no opportunities to verify it.
In general, like many families in our culture, our extended family on both sides lost any cohesion as the years went by and as the older members, who with their traditions had represented a sort of “glue” that kept us together at least during certain occasions, passed away. Add geographical distance and unresolved conflicts between some to the mix, and by the time I was in high school we rarely saw anyone outside of our own “nuclear family”.
Then I, myself, moved away to Italy, and the distance between myself and my extended family became even greater. I was rarely around even to attend the usual weddings and funerals, and so my aunts, uncles and cousins became people I only had memories of from my childhood.
From the very beginning of my life in Italy I was aware of the fact that much of what fascinated me about that culture was the family cohesion so prevalent there, that I had not experienced in my own family, and that seems to be rare in our culture now in general, especially among those whose roots lie in northern Europe, or whose ancestors immigrated here many generations ago.
I literally fell in love with how families seemed to stick together through thick and thin, and when I met the man I would marry and have children with, I am certain that I was as much in love with his traditional, Southern Italian family, as I was with him! I loved the regular get-togethers over delicious, well-prepared meals; I was entranced by the rituals like the yearly hog slaughter, which meant days of work and eating all together, with people coming and going. These traditions, beyond the usual ones of holidays, weddings, showers, baptisms, funerals etc., were kept alive both because most family members still lived within the area, and because it was simply a part of their life. I remember once when I tried to convince my then-husband to do something different on a Sunday, and he looked at me as though I had fallen from outer space (which in many ways I had, directly into a familial and cultural situation that was completely opposite from the one I had grown up in!!).
As time went on, I began seeing the darker side of this type of family cohesion, which was often expressed in what now in psychology is called “enmeshment”, or that in the school I trained in was identified as “symbiosis”. Whereas there was a strong sense of belonging and safety, there was also very little freedom and breathing room, which many struggled against without even really knowing why they were struggling. The type of control and manipulation between the various family members, extending far outwards, considering that the family was very big, was much more damaging and dangerous than I had originally understood.
I remember at one point formulating this thought: if one could make a synthesis of the best aspects of both cultures, the closeness of the Southern Italians with the kind of individual freedom that is worshipped in the States, it would be ideal! I began to build this ideal within my own heart, wanting to learn how to do it myself, so I could share it with others, first and foremost with my own children.
When I separated and later divorced my first husband, I was rocketed into a new dimension, one in which I was a divorced American woman on her own in the midst of a culture still built around the extended family. For many years I struggled to find my place there, while also maintaining as much contact as possible with my family of origin in the States. It was, at times, challenging to remain close to my immediate family, and any contact with anyone in the extended family completely faded away... and I don’t know if I ever really even thought of anyone, to be perfectly truthful.
As the years went on, my longing to feel more connected to my “roots” grew – it became more and more obvious to me that while I had managed to learn and live with many of the cultural “rules” of my chosen home, there was a piece of me that was always missing.
With the advent of the Internet, things changed. Suddenly I could have regular contact first with my parents – who were the ones who helped me purchase my first computer that could handle internet access, in 1998, so we could keep in touch easier – then with my siblings, and old friends that I had lost touch with as they were all scattered over the globe.
In 2003, I found myself going through a very difficult time, and I remembered that my cousin Bryn was a psychotherapist. We had had a chat on the phone perhaps ten years earlier, she was finishing up her studies then and I had just begun mine, and we exchanged some info and ideas. It was clear to me then that indeed we had quite a bit in common – not only were we both sort of “mavericks” within the family, but our paths had led us to similar places: training to be able to help other people find their place in the world, their own special place, where the past can be healed and the present can become a whole new start for a much better future. We had both made the choice to turn our own personal experiences and struggles into tools we could offer others as well.
During this personal crisis, she began popping into my head ... and so at one point I finally mustered up my courage, found her email on the internet, and wrote her a first message. It was a cry for help, in which I explicitly told her that the reason I felt the desire to ask her for support was because she was both a therapist and my cousin. I intuitively felt that a connection with her could help me make some steps forward in my life (and especially in a difficult relationship I was in) not only because she was a therapist, but because she was family. I longed for family. I had felt so isolated for so long from our extended family that I thought it was a completely closed door, but I wanted to see if that was true.
The warmth and enthusiasm of her response is something I am not sure I can find words for. That was the beginning of one of the most important relationships of my life: one where the closeness of family, of a shared history, is indeed melded with an absolute respect for each other’s freedom as individuals. I must say that she has given me much more than I perhaps could ever possibly give her: an incredibly generous soul, she has offered me material, emotional and spiritual gifts over these years that I could never repay. At the same time, we have lived through the cycles of relationship with a sort of flowing trust – the times of closeness are amply interspersed with times of greater distance due to whatever phase we are going through in our own lives, but the connection is never broken.
This, for me, has been a dream come true. One of the more important expressions of my “ideal” of melding family coherence with individual freedom. And Bryn brought me another gift, too, and that was a connection with another cousin, Joan, with whom she had reconnected some time earlier, and become close with. All of a sudden I was close with my two cousins that for me had been like distant goddesses when I was a child – beautiful, and dynamic, and older enough to make any common ground difficult then, here they were sharing their deepest selves with me, and I with them!
Truly a miracle. And whereas our amazing age of technology facilitated this, had there not been an intention and a desire on all our parts to discover and share who we are today and what we were continuously becoming, through thick and thin (and we have each had our share of rough spots over the years) it would have never happened. Had we not all had a longing to have the gift of closeness and freedom within our familial ties, we would not have found each other.
This is quite a lengthy background for the simpler story of the Suncatchers, which I will now get to, but it was absolutely necessary that I share the details that lead up to it, because my hope is that in this story some of you reading me can perhaps find some inspiration, or hope, or desire that can help you move into the holiday season with a new desire for connectedness with your families. A connectedness that does not suffocate your individuality – and we all have to fight for this to some degree – but also an individuality that does not destroy the connectedness, or make it into something impossible, fraught with leftovers from past hurts and misunderstandings.
The story of the Suncatchers is this:
I had signed the contract for my new studio the day before I received a phone call from Bryn, telling me that she and her husband Rod were going to come down to visit the next week. We hadn’t spoken or even emailed for quite some time, and I was thrilled by the “coincidence” that they would be coming during this momentous time for me! While talking on the phone I remembered how she is always full of creative projects, and I told her that if she had anything she wanted to display in my studio I would love to have it. She immediately said, “I can bring some Suncatchers! They would be perfect in your huge window!” (I had told her about my gigantic south-facing window, which had been on my list of “must-haves” for my own studio).
And that she did – a whole suitcase of them – and we spent an entire afternoon hanging out in the studio and placing them on the window.
Thus my studio was baptized with this gorgeous, creative energy coming from my cousin Bryn, which for me symbolizes not only the special type of relationship I have with her and her husband, but which is a testimony to how dreams do come true, even the most impossible of dreams, like building bridges in families that were broken and forgotten long ago.
For me, each of these Suncatchers represents this special energy of coming together, of finding a way to create new bonds with family, of stepping out of habits laid down even in generations previous to one’s own and forging new ways of being, of interacting, of loving each other. Their beauty is not only in their colors and shapes, but in how they got where they are today – travelling through time, and space, and years of disconnectedness and reminding us all that anything is truly possible, where there is love.
Let’s Think Twice About It ....
Mercury Retrograde in Virgo, August 20th to September 12th 2010
by Martha S. Bache-Wiig
I was planning on writing on a completely different topic for this second article for the “Me and the Stars” forum on the IPAE website, but recently I have received a number of questions regarding the meaning and the importance of a recent phenomenon, Mercury which is retrograde in the sign of Virgo. It seemed important that I respond to these questions by writing some points that my readers can reflect on and hopefully find useful in their lives.
Of all the astronomical events that occur cyclically, this is one of the most renowned even among those who are not very familiar with Astrology. I believe it receives a lot of attention because its effects can be observed in the daily life of many people.
When a planet becomes retrograde, what really is happening is an optical illusion. The planets in our solar system always move forward in their orbits around the Sun, but from our position here on Earth it sometimes seems as though they stop and start moving backwards for a certain period of time. This is because the orbital rotation of the Earth creates and illusory motion with respect to the other planets can change, and it’s like when you pass a car moving slower than you are on the freeway: when you pass it, it seems as though for a moment it is standing still, and then moving backwards.
What is interesting is that even though this phenomenon of retrograde movement is nothing but an optical illusion, human experience is such that well-defined affects that are connected to the symbolism of the planet have been observed during periods of retrograde movement.
Mercury has to do with communication, with mental processes and thinking, with travel etc. Therefore, when Mercury goes retrograde, and especially if its position is such that it interacts with one of our own planets of sensitive points in our charts, we can often observe all kinds of problems in these sectors of our lives. In our technological world of today, the effects are perhaps even more visible because so many of us have computers, cell phones, cars and all those things that are governed by this planet. Emails don’t arrive or they go to the wrong addresses, computers break down, radio signals are disturbed etc. etc. .
The nice thing, however, is that Astrology can offer us not only an explanation for these phenomena, but it also proposes a way to look that them that can help us make more out of them than a simple bother in the rapid flow of our lives.
The purpose of retrograde Mercury, which occurs usually 3 times during the course of a year (in 2010 there are 4 retrograde periods), is not just something to upset us and challenge us: it is, instead, a great opportunity to stop a moment and to look closely at what we are really doing and where we are going.
For example, any Astrologer will tell you that periods of Mercury retrograde are not the best times to sign contracts, to formulate projects and to make long term commitments, because it is not a time where mental “action” is at its clearest. It is a time that is especially good for reflecting closely on what we are doing and on getting into the details of things.
Even when we are faced with technological breakdowns, with delays in our travels, with miscommunication in various ways in our relationships, the “message” is not to keep pushing ahead in an attempt to overcome the resistance we are facing with an act of personal will. Instead, all the obstacles that we encounter always contain an element of wisdom, they are invitations to go more deeply into how we are living our lives.
In today’s society, where the speed in our communications and our interpersonal interactions has become a type of “god” that dictates the quality – or the lack of quality – of our lives, Mercury retrograde can truly be an opportunity to stop a moment and ask ourselves: where is it, really, that I want to go? How do I want to get there? And with whom?
It doesn’t mean that our projects don’t have any value, but it does help us understand that in our lives there are elements that are “conscious”, which are visible and even somewhat under our “control”, and there are then others that are more hidden and less accessible to our minds. For many of us, it is not only difficult but it is even unthinkable that we halt our race towards the things we believe are important to us, and that we obtain often at the expense of our health and our general wellbeing. We give our minds an absolute value, forgetting that the mind is only an instrument or tool of our being, and not our “being” in and of itself.
Therefore retrograde Mercury is a moment of great depth and creativity, if we are able to let go for a moment our ways of thinking that tend to fixate us in repetitive thoughts and behaviors that constantly brings us the same results, even though they are not at all the ones we would like to have!
There is a saying: “Nothing changes if nothing changes” – if we continue to think and act in the same old ways, we will always stay exactly where we are today.
Mercury retrograde, instead, is an invitation to review what thoughts and behaviors we are holding on to, and that do not allow us to truly progress in our lives. It invites us to begin seeing them from a completely different point of view.
It is very interesting, because this process is often associated with a profound decision that we must make that will influence the course of our lives from that moment on – until the next period of review, obviously – that very well might coincide with the next period of Mercury retrograde! And while at the time this decision making process might seem like something that is committing us for an indefinite amount of time, the cyclical nature of the phenomenon can help us see that everything we make a decision about today, whether it be “right” or “wrong” for us, will again be subject to review further on. With this type of awareness, we can allow ourselves to not only be more responsible towards ourselves, and to take the time we need to reflect on the important things in our lives, but it can also help us be kinder and a bit more gentle. The continual growth process that we are all constantly undergoing, whether or not we are aware of it, is not something that is going “against” us, and it is not a prison: the cycles of life, which are so clearly visible in Astrology, are at our service. They are helpful to us in our slow but constant progress in learning about ourselves, learning about the world we live in, and learning how we can align ourselves ever more to “who we are”, so we can not only live well with ourselves, but we can be of service to Life.
My hope is that if, during the next couple weeks, you are about to throw your computer out the window because it has frozen up and you can’t seem to find the problem (or if you find yourself faced with any type of obstacle, especially within your intimate relationships!), instead of acting on impulse you are able to stop a moment and ask yourselves: what is it that this obstacle is helping me see?
It could very well be that you will discover some incredible things, for example an inner permission to slow down a bit and perhaps do some “cleaning” on a mental, emotional and even material level. It is said, in fact, that this is a great time to clean out closets and shelves, and to free ourselves of all those old things that we don’t need any more. This can be an extremely freeing and therapeutic activity all in itself, and it can open us up to even deeper reflections regarding other types of extra “baggage” that we are carrying around within ourselves, and especially those negative thoughts that are always going around in our heads and are so often aimed against our own selves.
Retrograde Mercury is also an invitation to give less power to the mind, and to do things that can help us appreciate other parts of our being that are just as important – for example our bodies. The invitation is one to help us detach from our mental fixations and our technology, and to go take a nice walk, or any other type of activitiy that can nourish our global being – body, spirit .... and only after that, the mind.
If we manage to live this time with an attitude of adventure rather than bad luck, it can open doors for us that we were not aware existed, and bring us into dimensions of understanding ourselves and life.... until the next retrograde period, when we will have the opportunity to do it all again! But I must say that in my experience, since I have learned to accept these periods relatively graciously and with, as much as possible, a sense of humor (Mercurio is also the trickster!), not only do I go through with much less stress, but I have been able to recognize them for the real gift that they are.
It has just now come to mind that the control board for the commuter trains on the East coast of the U.S.A. between New York City and Washington, D.C. went haywire a few days ago, just after Mercury went retrograde, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without transportation. If that is not a strong invitation, sent right into the heart of our modern frenetic rhythms, I don’t know what it is!
Let’s welcome, then, Mercury’s invitation, that is reminding us that life is not just about efficiency and continual rush, but it is also being able to play and to enjoy Life, simply as it is.
From Kronos to Kairos:
The Opportunity within the New Power Paradigm
Instead, in the almost twenty years that I have been studying this ancient “art-science”, I have had the opportunity to verify that Astrology doesn’t really help us if we approach it with the intent to understand what the “facts” of our life will be, with a mentality anchored in old ways of thinking that there is a destiny predetermined by a “god” or a “universe” outside ourselves that has a plan already set up for us. There is no doubt that throughout history many astrologers have been able to predict certain events in the lives of individuals and groups (such as nations etc.) with surprising accuracy. But it is also without doubt that for every prediction that has been “right on”, even the most expert astrologers end up making at least one that is, instead, far from what actually happens in reality.
During the last century, with the incredible development of technology, on one hand, that today allows us to measure the electromagnetic fields produced by the sun and to see how they interact with those of the various planets in our solar system, and, on the other, with the equally extraordinary growth in our understanding of humanity in its mind-body-spirit globality, Astrology too has gone through a deep change, thanks to how the discoveries made in psychoanalysis/psychology, the new spiritual directions that have evolved and the new physics have all been integrated with it.
Today, many astrologers see Astrology not so much as a means to predict the “facts” of our lives, because it is ever more evident that the result of any type of planetary influence depends on the level of personal awareness that has been reached by the individual having their chart done. While I am writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps this fact has to do indeed with a real evolutionary step forward that humanity is in the process of making (that can also be “read” astrologically, and that is related to the various hypotheses that have been recently set forward regarding predictions made by ancient cultures, for example those of the Maya). While it is true that we are still far from being a species that has arrived at a level of evolution that could be considered “enlightened”, it is nevertheless true that today certain concepts and certain abilities for self-evaluation and for the development of individual consciousness are spread across many sectors and socio-economic classes, while in a not so distant past these things were still exclusively reserved to an intellectual or socio-economical elite, when they were not completely closed within the confines of the various religious dogmas.
The New Power Paradigm and the Human-Cosmic Dance
As Antonio Mercurio affirms in Chapter III of his book “The Cosmo-Art Theorems and Axioms”, which discusses some results of research done on Prenatal Anthropology throughout the years in the Institutes and Centers associated to the Sophia University of Rome, today within a growing number of human beings there is a level of awareness already during intrauterine life of their being a Person, a being that is an end unto itself and to none other, that was not present before. From a “primitive” state of feeling ineluctably fused to the reality of our parents (and especially our mothers) and of the environment we are born into, we are now moving towards an ability to individuate and to center ourselves on our own SELF . This opens the door to new possibilities for freedom and creativity .... as well as responsibility. The other side of the coin is that this growing awareness means that we are also more sensitive, and we experience the trauma of not being considered Persons already at the intrauterine level in a much more dramatic way. This means that many of us are “forced” to look for new ways to heal these wounds and integrate those parts of ourselves that are split and fragmented.
Thus the question that has dogged humanity since the beginning of time, how free am I to choose my destiny, and how much, instead, am I conditioned by the various realities around me that I am a part of?, today assumes a new level of importance.
It is always more evident to many that we are all immersed in a continual dance between those things that condition us and the choices that only we can make, both to free us from our conditioning and to realize ourselves by following the voice of the SELF that speaks to us both from within and from around us. “Wisdom” lies in the ability to embrace the various stimuli that come at us from every direction and to become ever more capable of aligning our own wills with that of the SELF and of Life.
We can look at the contribution that Astrology can offer in general, and my own specific approach that I call Anthropo-Astrology, because it attempts to weave the tools of Astrology together with the theories and modalities proposed by Existential Personalistic Anthropology, as a possibility to understand even better the steps of the dance between the human and the cosmic that we are all dancing (whether or not we are aware of it) in every moment of our existence.
The continual interaction between the planets within our solar system offers us an immediate glance at a basic reality, that we are all immersed in a system, an organism that is greater than we are. It is not easy, at first, to feel the relationship that we have with an organism that is so much greater than we are; it can seem a bit difficult to find a personal, individual connection within it and to feel that we are an integral part of it, instead of feeling that we are a cell that is so small as to have no importance whatsoever. But if we think for a moment how today, thanks to our technology, we all have “proof” of how the cosmic “forces”, for example those of the sun, can have an influence on our daily lives, this connection is evident. In fact, every time there is a strong solar flare, radio waves within earth’s atmosphere are disturbed and we can notice, just to offer a rather banal example, that our cell phones start having reception problems. Not to mention disturbances that are even more notable, such as those that occurred in December of 2007, when two large solar flares completely interrupted the Global Positioning System (the so-called GPS that by now many use even for the shortest of journeys).
These “disturbances”, that we are today able to recognize thanks to the instruments we have available and that have become a part of our daily lives, make it very clear how much the energies that flow and swirl everywhere within us and outside of us have a real “effect”. Understanding this helps us, also, to make a step ahead mentally and begin to intuit how much the energies that we ourselves produce interact and influence the “all” that we are a part of. We are not cells that are isolated from everything else, or entities that passively endure all that happens outside of us: we are continually interacting with every other thing, every other energy, every other being, whether we are aware of it, or not.
Astrology has recognized this “reality” for millennia, and it offers a symbolic visualization of what is happening in every moment within our solar system, and how this organism we are immersed in interacts with each one of us. It also recognizes that each one of us is a “system” within this much greater system, and how as such our own actions also have an effect on the “parent” organism. This view of the interaction between organisms of various sizes overturns a concept of a static, immutable god outside ourselves that is not influenced by our own actions, and it stimulates us to develop a much deeper awareness of the particular responsibility we each have in being able to grasp the stimuli that come to us from the “cosmic” organism, and to use them in creative and vital ways for our own individual good, and, thus, for the good of the Whole.
Astrology helps us see that the stimuli that we receive in any given moment have certain characteristics, recognizable through the symbolism attributed to the planets, but it also helps us understand that it is up to us to decide how we will react to them. It helps us comprehend what our basic tendencies are, our strong points and our weaknesses, and it asks us to become aware of them, so we can use them in a way that they become of service to our own lives and thus to Life in general. It illustrates how when faced with any type of stimulus, whether it be “positive” or “negative”, we always have a choice, and that for each one of us the process of discernment that we will follow will have certain characteristics that will depend, however, on the level of awareness that we have reached up until that point.
These stimuli are simply that: stimuli. They are not put forth with judgment, or with an expectation of the “divinity”. They are invitations, that will be set forth in a cyclical manner, and it will be up to each one of us to decide what to do with them when we receive them. Humanity’s historical experience teaches us how much our individual and collective decisions have an influence on our evolution; our own experience helps us understand even more how every reaction to the stimuli we receive has a direct influence on the course our lives will take from that moment onward.
The Invitation of the Saturn-Uranus opposition
To offer a more concrete example, let’s look now at a planetary interaction that has been taking place for the last couple years, the opposition between Uranus and Saturn, and that is having an evident effect on the events that are unfolding in today’s world.
The attention of astrologers the world over has been galvanized towards the repeated opposition that has already formed four times up to now (June 2010) between these two planets, and that will be again exact a fifth and last time on July 26, 2010. This last opposition will also involve other planets that are among the “potent ones” in the astrological sky: Jupiter will be conjunct Uranus in Aries, Mars will be conjunct Saturn in Libra, and Pluto, at 3 degrees Capricorn, will be in a square (90 degrees) aspect to both sides of the opposition.
If you do a search on the internet about the meaning of these aspects in Astrology and of the effects already felt on the earth plane, you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, written by astrologers from every part of the globe. In this article, I don’t want to go too far into the meaning of this situation, and into the effects that are evident all around us (among which the most obvious is the extremely high volatility of the financial markets and the economic crisis that the whole western world has been plunged into since the beginning of this cycle), even though it is important to note that the first time these two planets opposed each other in the sky, on November 4th, 2008, a “revolution” came about in USA politics: Barack Obama was elected president. Not only is Obama the first African-American man to be elected into such a high position in the history of this country, but he is a man who came in with a precise idea of the reforms he intended to bring about within structures that were extremely rigid, such as that of the health care system and, more recently, the financial system (both structures represented by Saturn).
What is happening here in America, from the choice of a president who is truly “different” (even if we only look at the color of his skin and at his origins as a “normal person”, Obama represents an enormous change in American politics with respect to the past), to the economic crisis that this time has truly influenced everyone, and to the changes recently made that are no less than shocking in the health care system and in the laws governing the financial systems of the world’s capitalist giant (no matter what one’s political sympathies are, no one can deny that things are being turned upside down and that ways of looking at things and of operating that seemed unchangeable are being shaken up), it is an eloquent testimony to the “message” that these planets in opposition seem to be sending to human beings. It is also an illustration of the fact that a sufficient number of people were resonating with this message of change, so much so that they chose to give their vote to the man that represents it in this moment in time.
In this current clash-embrace, they seem to be saying: the time has come to change; the old structures that seemed so reassuring are out of date now and have started to damage you.
The last two cycles of oppositions between these two “greats” of the zodiac occurred in the years 1916-1919 and in 1964-1967 ... two periods that set the stage for other “revolutions”, a political one with the re-mapping of Europe after the First World War, and a cultural one in the 1960s with the emergence of new ways of thinking and acting throughout the world. We are all aware of the effects that this opposition brought with it in the 1960s: new music, new spiritual orientations (the encounter between East-West), a new attention to the civil rights of minorities and women, the beginning of a systematic exploration of the solar system etc. etc. It is also interesting to notice that the Vatican Council II concluded in 1965, which announced that the Catholic Church – one of the organizations most tenaciously anchored to its traditions in the whole world, and that has a direct influence on the mindset of millions of people – was going to attempt to adapt to the emerging realties of the “modern world”.
It is important to look at these cycles of the past to get an idea of the force they have in transforming (Uranus) old structures (Saturn). In fact, many of the astrologers who have written articles on this recent cycle of oppositions concentrate their attention on this aspect, which is, without doubt, of great relevance, and which can offer important clues to anyone who is influenced on a personal/individual level by it if they have planets or sensitive points in the degrees touched either directly or by aspect by this truly important “cosmic dance”.
This is something that involves all of us, either directly on an individual level for many of us, or indirectly, due to the fact that it is affecting all of society, and it is expressed in a manifest way in the facts of our lives and in the matter of our living, whether or not we are aware of it. And this is exactly the point: when such a strong stimulus arrives from “outside”, on an individual and a collective level, we are always called to make a choice. Will we decide to follow the impulse to review our structures, our positions anchored on concepts of security and power that today are not only possible for us to overcome, but have begun to be an obstacle in our evolutionary journey towards an awareness that is more integrated and vital? Or not?
Up until today the dominant model of power that we have chosen to follow is that of “power over”, or of “phallic power” (as described by Antonio Mercurio in the article written together with his wife Paola Sensini Mercurio, “Harmonization of the Masculine Principle and the Feminine Principle”, soon to be available on the SUR’s website at www.sur.it). It is the so-called “law of the jungle”, the law of the domination of the stronger, the survival of those who manage to win over others.
This model, that has been in place for millennia, has most certainly had its purpose. It brought us to consolidate ourselves in communities of every greater complexity and efficiency, allowing us to understand and utilize our resources to greater advantage.
But if we look a moment at how this model has already been “challenged” during the last two cycles of Saturn-Uranus opposition, with first a dismantling of a concept of “empire” until that point taken for granted (the Austro-Hungarian), and then a rapid introduction of completely new ideas regarding daily life, health and religion – and, just as one example, that also produced a deep “crisis” within certain structures that were, up until then, sacred, such as marriage – we can begin to understand what might be happening today, with the various crises that we are going through.
During this most recent cycle, as mentioned above, one of the more evident effects is the great crisis that has struck the financial markets throughout the world. This crisis has had a dramatic, immediate effect on many people, and has brought to the surface an unhealthy use of economic power at all levels of society. We could say that it has helped us understand how much our concept of “power over” in the area of how we use our resources, expressed both in the “high” ranks of finance as well as in the “lower” levels of our individual lives, has revealed itself to not quite be the great playground that many believed it was. Nourished by greed and by the demand to always be able to “have” more and more without any regard for the consequences that this ravenous drive can have on our deeper wellbeing, it is now becoming clear how illusory this model really is, and how such domination over Life can never be truly satisfying.
It is forcing us to ask ourselves what our deepest values truly are, and to decide what we want to give precedence to, often through situations of great discomfort. It makes us contact our most ancient fears regarding our survival and it asks us to look beyond them, to see them for what they truly are – expressions of our great vulnerability, when we have not yet found a true “center” within ourselves that is in harmony with Life.
It is interesting for me to see how many people around me seem to be willing, today, to look at new ways of “thinking of life”. As always, times of great loss and great crisis push us to look beyond the surface of our lives and to go more deeply, to see what we no longer need and to free ourselves of it, so we can open up to another phase, to a next level of awareness and creativity.
From Kronos to Kairos
“Kronos” was the Greek name for Saturn, and it represents the strength, order, discipline – and tyranny – of the model of “power over” or “phallic power”. It represents the passage of Time – that for humans has always been something to be afraid of, since passing time means always that death is nearing. The passage of Time also means that nothing is stable: everything that we experience today that is beautiful, will be gone tomorrow ... and even though what is ugly won’t be here either, “This Too Shall Pass” is often experienced not as something to be embraced and accepted, but rather is seen as something to be afraid of, since it shows us clearly how Life is always moving, how unpredictable it is, and how, despite our many attempts to do so, we are completely incapable of controlling it. We can never simply sit down in the armchair and watch: sooner or later we are always called to change something, or to accept the changes that arrive, whether or not we looked for them or asked for them. And since Life asks us always to keep on changing and growing along with it, our concept of these external forces that make us continue to evolve is often negative and persecutory.
What we are called to understand, during this cycle of Saturn-Uranus oppositions, is how much this concept is indeed our own interpretation of this cosmic force, and of how much the type of power which is authoritative and rarely respectful of the dignity and the precious contributions of our own Personal Selves is not an imposition made upon us by “heaven” or by “god”, but instead represents a mere step in our evolution. It is not an ineluctable law that comes down from outside ourselves: it is a system that we have built, to give us those structures that we needed so we could reach a level of apparent security, in a world where there is rarely much security and predictability at all, due to the fact that everything is always changing, and also due to the fact that death is always waiting for us right around the bend.
The invitation, instead, is one of Kairos – of the ability to understand that behind every change, within every invitation sent to us from Life, and perhaps especially within those experiences that are difficult and painful – lies a great opportunity. Kairos was the word the Greeks coined for the fact that for everything there is an opportune moment during which one can change the circumstances. In theological rhetoric, Kairos is defined as a passing instant when an opening appears, through which one must forcefully pass if one wants to be successful.
In antiquity this ability was attributed only to an intellectual and socio-economic elite that could allow themselves the luxury of an education, and more recently it has been seen, within Christian culture, as a possibility open only to those who embraced a certain concept of “god”.
Today, instead, this invitation is open to us all. The ability to become aware of our individual importance within Life, and of our responsibility regarding our understanding of “who we are”, is no longer reserved to a fortunate few. Today we can all become capable of making those choices that make us truly grow in our ability to contribute something truly useful to ourselves, to those around to us, and to Life itself.
Therefore, this is truly an important moment for many of us, and the choices we will make will have an effect on the wellbeing of the organism we are a part of. If you are now living through great changes, whether or not they are pleasurable it is probable that the Saturn-Uranus opposition is directly influencing a planet or a sensitive point in your natal chart.
Just to add a personal example, this opposition last year “struck” head on a series of very sensitive points in my own natal chart, that at first manifested in the form of some serious health problems. It helped me, however, make some extremely important decisions with regards to my work and to how I was organizing my life in many ways (it was acting on my tenth house, the house that governs work); it “forced” me to listen to myself on a much deeper level, and it “brought” me some new and precious information that greatly aided me in making decisions that were much more in harmony with “who I am”. I must say that these discoveries were precious not only in the sense that I discovered a greater freedom: I found a greater freedom in a new, humble ability to recognize and accept things that up until then I considered personal limitations, and that for years I had attempted to modify so as to be more similar to those around me.
These changes were not devoid of moments of suffering and anguish, and they took place over the course of several months. But if I look back now, I can see how, fortunately, these “nudges” indeed helped me move forward in my own personal journey of evolution, and how, later on, they gave me the opportunity to invest my energies in completely new ways (for example, writing this article!). At the same time, I have no doubt whatsoever that had I become more rigidly attached to my old way of thinking, I would have encountered even more serious problems. And this would not have been because these cosmic energies would have “punished” me, but rather simply because I would have been refusing to listen, and to understand that the structures that had given me security up until that time had become prisons, and my deeper being could no longer stay within them without beginning to atrophy.
To go back for a moment to the concept of “phallic power”, it is important to understand how often we use this “power over” not only in our relationships with others, trying to make them be the way we would like them to be, or in our attitude towards Life, getting angry when things don’t go the way we would like them to, but how we use it especially in our relationship with ourselves. We cling to ways of thinking about life that seem to give us security, but beyond a certain point they begin to take our life away from us. If we don’t decide to be born beyond those old models, if we don’t decide to leave the reassuring “uterus” of our old convictions, we run the risk of dying inside of them, exactly like a baby would die should it refuse to leave the womb when it is time for it to do so (sometimes taking the mother along with it).
If we manage to transform this model within ourselves, if we manage to make, one at a time, choices that allow us to go deeper, more in harmony with our SELF, we not only allow our lives to go on and to continually blossom into new forms, but our decisions to evolve become an energy, an example, and a contribution of great value, not only to those closest to us, but to all of Life. These concepts are amply described by various masters and authors coming from many different cultures and traditions, but I here would like to indicate Existential Personalistic Anthropology and the works of Antonio Mercurio, its founder, that I encountered shortly before I began my adventure into Astrology (and which brought about my Anthropo-Astrology), and that have represented for me an invitation to new ways of thinking and of living that have completely transformed me over time. For further exploration of this particular viewpoint, besides the works I mentioned earlier I would like to suggest “Hypotheses on Ulysses”, available for free download on the internet at www.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Hypotheses-On-Ulysses or at my blog site www.personcenter99.blogger.com). (“The Ulysseans” and “The Cosmo-Art Theorems and Axioms”, recently translated by me into English, will also be available soon).
Astrology helps us understand how during the course of our lives, in a cyclical manner, these “invitations” to evolve and to participate in the Human-Cosmic Dance with ever greater attention and an ever more open mind come to us. While it is true that they are always there in the background, it is also true that each one of us has an individual journey, and that the when and the how we open to these evolutionary nudges and to the ability to integrate them into our own lives is highly personal. For this reason “Kronos” – Time – nonetheless remains precious and important: the appointments we make with our individual evolution are set within Time, and in this view we always get to them at the “right moment” (even though it often doesn’t seem so to us!). The wisdom of Kairos comes as we become ever more capable of embracing these invitations truly as invitations to a dance, to something that brings us forward, as occasions and opportunities to become never Tyrants of our experiences, with absolute control, but willing Co-Creators, humble, and capable of experiencing pain not as a punishment, but as an opportunity to free ourselves of our armor and to open up to the processes of Life. It can most certainly help to be aware of these cycles, and to allow the knowledge that Astrology offers regarding them to be of service to us.
I wish for everyone, and especially for those who have gone through or are going through difficult times in this period, to be able to find the love for themselves, the courage and the energy they need to follow the Kairos of this moment. It is truly a golden opportunity for all of us that is presenting itself in this life.
I do suggest, however, that you find good allies during this process, because there is no doubt that another message in this moment is one that encourages us to open up to others, not to continue dominating or be dominated, but to share the journey, to exchange strength and knowledge, to stimulate, reinforce and help each other to move forward towards a life ever more free of old concepts of power that keep us all isolated, fearful, and ever more violent in our attempts to defend our illusions of security.
As we slowly free ourselves of these ideas of security that inevitably become prisons, and we decide to walk together with others who also have the courage to go through the great trials that these choices always bring with them, we can become capable, perhaps, of creating that Beauty that Antonio Mercurio talks about, Secondary Beauty, the result of two or more people acting together to create a type of energy that the universe needs to fulfill its dream of immortality.
It is a great opportunity, it truly is.
And you, what will you decide?
An Anthropo-Astrological perspective by Martha S. Bache-Wiig
Why Astrology?
For many, Astrology is seen as a pseudo-scientific attempt to predict our future, expressing a basic philosophy that everything is already predetermined and therefore all we need to do to know what will happen in our lives is learn how to “read” the meaning of the planetary positions in any given moment. This type of approach offers, on one hand, a sort of reassurance, because it lifts a basic responsibility from our shoulders regarding the quality of our lives; on the other hand, however, it can’t but instill a great fear within us, because we feel absolutely conditioned by “fate”. If the stars tell us “bad” things, it is inevitable that our lives will end up being difficult and painful, and we can’t do anything about it. In this manner, Astrology does nothing more than heighten our feeling of impotence and “non-sense” before the great mysteries of our existence, especially when we are facing situations that are highly challenging.Instead, in the almost twenty years that I have been studying this ancient “art-science”, I have had the opportunity to verify that Astrology doesn’t really help us if we approach it with the intent to understand what the “facts” of our life will be, with a mentality anchored in old ways of thinking that there is a destiny predetermined by a “god” or a “universe” outside ourselves that has a plan already set up for us. There is no doubt that throughout history many astrologers have been able to predict certain events in the lives of individuals and groups (such as nations etc.) with surprising accuracy. But it is also without doubt that for every prediction that has been “right on”, even the most expert astrologers end up making at least one that is, instead, far from what actually happens in reality.
During the last century, with the incredible development of technology, on one hand, that today allows us to measure the electromagnetic fields produced by the sun and to see how they interact with those of the various planets in our solar system, and, on the other, with the equally extraordinary growth in our understanding of humanity in its mind-body-spirit globality, Astrology too has gone through a deep change, thanks to how the discoveries made in psychoanalysis/psychology, the new spiritual directions that have evolved and the new physics have all been integrated with it.
Today, many astrologers see Astrology not so much as a means to predict the “facts” of our lives, because it is ever more evident that the result of any type of planetary influence depends on the level of personal awareness that has been reached by the individual having their chart done. While I am writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps this fact has to do indeed with a real evolutionary step forward that humanity is in the process of making (that can also be “read” astrologically, and that is related to the various hypotheses that have been recently set forward regarding predictions made by ancient cultures, for example those of the Maya). While it is true that we are still far from being a species that has arrived at a level of evolution that could be considered “enlightened”, it is nevertheless true that today certain concepts and certain abilities for self-evaluation and for the development of individual consciousness are spread across many sectors and socio-economic classes, while in a not so distant past these things were still exclusively reserved to an intellectual or socio-economical elite, when they were not completely closed within the confines of the various religious dogmas.
The New Power Paradigm and the Human-Cosmic Dance
As Antonio Mercurio affirms in Chapter III of his book “The Cosmo-Art Theorems and Axioms”, which discusses some results of research done on Prenatal Anthropology throughout the years in the Institutes and Centers associated to the Sophia University of Rome, today within a growing number of human beings there is a level of awareness already during intrauterine life of their being a Person, a being that is an end unto itself and to none other, that was not present before. From a “primitive” state of feeling ineluctably fused to the reality of our parents (and especially our mothers) and of the environment we are born into, we are now moving towards an ability to individuate and to center ourselves on our own SELF . This opens the door to new possibilities for freedom and creativity .... as well as responsibility. The other side of the coin is that this growing awareness means that we are also more sensitive, and we experience the trauma of not being considered Persons already at the intrauterine level in a much more dramatic way. This means that many of us are “forced” to look for new ways to heal these wounds and integrate those parts of ourselves that are split and fragmented.
Thus the question that has dogged humanity since the beginning of time, how free am I to choose my destiny, and how much, instead, am I conditioned by the various realities around me that I am a part of?, today assumes a new level of importance.
It is always more evident to many that we are all immersed in a continual dance between those things that condition us and the choices that only we can make, both to free us from our conditioning and to realize ourselves by following the voice of the SELF that speaks to us both from within and from around us. “Wisdom” lies in the ability to embrace the various stimuli that come at us from every direction and to become ever more capable of aligning our own wills with that of the SELF and of Life.
We can look at the contribution that Astrology can offer in general, and my own specific approach that I call Anthropo-Astrology, because it attempts to weave the tools of Astrology together with the theories and modalities proposed by Existential Personalistic Anthropology, as a possibility to understand even better the steps of the dance between the human and the cosmic that we are all dancing (whether or not we are aware of it) in every moment of our existence.
The continual interaction between the planets within our solar system offers us an immediate glance at a basic reality, that we are all immersed in a system, an organism that is greater than we are. It is not easy, at first, to feel the relationship that we have with an organism that is so much greater than we are; it can seem a bit difficult to find a personal, individual connection within it and to feel that we are an integral part of it, instead of feeling that we are a cell that is so small as to have no importance whatsoever. But if we think for a moment how today, thanks to our technology, we all have “proof” of how the cosmic “forces”, for example those of the sun, can have an influence on our daily lives, this connection is evident. In fact, every time there is a strong solar flare, radio waves within earth’s atmosphere are disturbed and we can notice, just to offer a rather banal example, that our cell phones start having reception problems. Not to mention disturbances that are even more notable, such as those that occurred in December of 2007, when two large solar flares completely interrupted the Global Positioning System (the so-called GPS that by now many use even for the shortest of journeys).
These “disturbances”, that we are today able to recognize thanks to the instruments we have available and that have become a part of our daily lives, make it very clear how much the energies that flow and swirl everywhere within us and outside of us have a real “effect”. Understanding this helps us, also, to make a step ahead mentally and begin to intuit how much the energies that we ourselves produce interact and influence the “all” that we are a part of. We are not cells that are isolated from everything else, or entities that passively endure all that happens outside of us: we are continually interacting with every other thing, every other energy, every other being, whether we are aware of it, or not.
Astrology has recognized this “reality” for millennia, and it offers a symbolic visualization of what is happening in every moment within our solar system, and how this organism we are immersed in interacts with each one of us. It also recognizes that each one of us is a “system” within this much greater system, and how as such our own actions also have an effect on the “parent” organism. This view of the interaction between organisms of various sizes overturns a concept of a static, immutable god outside ourselves that is not influenced by our own actions, and it stimulates us to develop a much deeper awareness of the particular responsibility we each have in being able to grasp the stimuli that come to us from the “cosmic” organism, and to use them in creative and vital ways for our own individual good, and, thus, for the good of the Whole.
Astrology helps us see that the stimuli that we receive in any given moment have certain characteristics, recognizable through the symbolism attributed to the planets, but it also helps us understand that it is up to us to decide how we will react to them. It helps us comprehend what our basic tendencies are, our strong points and our weaknesses, and it asks us to become aware of them, so we can use them in a way that they become of service to our own lives and thus to Life in general. It illustrates how when faced with any type of stimulus, whether it be “positive” or “negative”, we always have a choice, and that for each one of us the process of discernment that we will follow will have certain characteristics that will depend, however, on the level of awareness that we have reached up until that point.
These stimuli are simply that: stimuli. They are not put forth with judgment, or with an expectation of the “divinity”. They are invitations, that will be set forth in a cyclical manner, and it will be up to each one of us to decide what to do with them when we receive them. Humanity’s historical experience teaches us how much our individual and collective decisions have an influence on our evolution; our own experience helps us understand even more how every reaction to the stimuli we receive has a direct influence on the course our lives will take from that moment onward.
The Invitation of the Saturn-Uranus opposition
To offer a more concrete example, let’s look now at a planetary interaction that has been taking place for the last couple years, the opposition between Uranus and Saturn, and that is having an evident effect on the events that are unfolding in today’s world.
The attention of astrologers the world over has been galvanized towards the repeated opposition that has already formed four times up to now (June 2010) between these two planets, and that will be again exact a fifth and last time on July 26, 2010. This last opposition will also involve other planets that are among the “potent ones” in the astrological sky: Jupiter will be conjunct Uranus in Aries, Mars will be conjunct Saturn in Libra, and Pluto, at 3 degrees Capricorn, will be in a square (90 degrees) aspect to both sides of the opposition.
If you do a search on the internet about the meaning of these aspects in Astrology and of the effects already felt on the earth plane, you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, written by astrologers from every part of the globe. In this article, I don’t want to go too far into the meaning of this situation, and into the effects that are evident all around us (among which the most obvious is the extremely high volatility of the financial markets and the economic crisis that the whole western world has been plunged into since the beginning of this cycle), even though it is important to note that the first time these two planets opposed each other in the sky, on November 4th, 2008, a “revolution” came about in USA politics: Barack Obama was elected president. Not only is Obama the first African-American man to be elected into such a high position in the history of this country, but he is a man who came in with a precise idea of the reforms he intended to bring about within structures that were extremely rigid, such as that of the health care system and, more recently, the financial system (both structures represented by Saturn).
What is happening here in America, from the choice of a president who is truly “different” (even if we only look at the color of his skin and at his origins as a “normal person”, Obama represents an enormous change in American politics with respect to the past), to the economic crisis that this time has truly influenced everyone, and to the changes recently made that are no less than shocking in the health care system and in the laws governing the financial systems of the world’s capitalist giant (no matter what one’s political sympathies are, no one can deny that things are being turned upside down and that ways of looking at things and of operating that seemed unchangeable are being shaken up), it is an eloquent testimony to the “message” that these planets in opposition seem to be sending to human beings. It is also an illustration of the fact that a sufficient number of people were resonating with this message of change, so much so that they chose to give their vote to the man that represents it in this moment in time.
In this current clash-embrace, they seem to be saying: the time has come to change; the old structures that seemed so reassuring are out of date now and have started to damage you.
The last two cycles of oppositions between these two “greats” of the zodiac occurred in the years 1916-1919 and in 1964-1967 ... two periods that set the stage for other “revolutions”, a political one with the re-mapping of Europe after the First World War, and a cultural one in the 1960s with the emergence of new ways of thinking and acting throughout the world. We are all aware of the effects that this opposition brought with it in the 1960s: new music, new spiritual orientations (the encounter between East-West), a new attention to the civil rights of minorities and women, the beginning of a systematic exploration of the solar system etc. etc. It is also interesting to notice that the Vatican Council II concluded in 1965, which announced that the Catholic Church – one of the organizations most tenaciously anchored to its traditions in the whole world, and that has a direct influence on the mindset of millions of people – was going to attempt to adapt to the emerging realties of the “modern world”.
It is important to look at these cycles of the past to get an idea of the force they have in transforming (Uranus) old structures (Saturn). In fact, many of the astrologers who have written articles on this recent cycle of oppositions concentrate their attention on this aspect, which is, without doubt, of great relevance, and which can offer important clues to anyone who is influenced on a personal/individual level by it if they have planets or sensitive points in the degrees touched either directly or by aspect by this truly important “cosmic dance”.
This is something that involves all of us, either directly on an individual level for many of us, or indirectly, due to the fact that it is affecting all of society, and it is expressed in a manifest way in the facts of our lives and in the matter of our living, whether or not we are aware of it. And this is exactly the point: when such a strong stimulus arrives from “outside”, on an individual and a collective level, we are always called to make a choice. Will we decide to follow the impulse to review our structures, our positions anchored on concepts of security and power that today are not only possible for us to overcome, but have begun to be an obstacle in our evolutionary journey towards an awareness that is more integrated and vital? Or not?
Up until today the dominant model of power that we have chosen to follow is that of “power over”, or of “phallic power” (as described by Antonio Mercurio in the article written together with his wife Paola Sensini Mercurio, “Harmonization of the Masculine Principle and the Feminine Principle”, soon to be available on the SUR’s website at www.sur.it). It is the so-called “law of the jungle”, the law of the domination of the stronger, the survival of those who manage to win over others.
This model, that has been in place for millennia, has most certainly had its purpose. It brought us to consolidate ourselves in communities of every greater complexity and efficiency, allowing us to understand and utilize our resources to greater advantage.
But if we look a moment at how this model has already been “challenged” during the last two cycles of Saturn-Uranus opposition, with first a dismantling of a concept of “empire” until that point taken for granted (the Austro-Hungarian), and then a rapid introduction of completely new ideas regarding daily life, health and religion – and, just as one example, that also produced a deep “crisis” within certain structures that were, up until then, sacred, such as marriage – we can begin to understand what might be happening today, with the various crises that we are going through.
During this most recent cycle, as mentioned above, one of the more evident effects is the great crisis that has struck the financial markets throughout the world. This crisis has had a dramatic, immediate effect on many people, and has brought to the surface an unhealthy use of economic power at all levels of society. We could say that it has helped us understand how much our concept of “power over” in the area of how we use our resources, expressed both in the “high” ranks of finance as well as in the “lower” levels of our individual lives, has revealed itself to not quite be the great playground that many believed it was. Nourished by greed and by the demand to always be able to “have” more and more without any regard for the consequences that this ravenous drive can have on our deeper wellbeing, it is now becoming clear how illusory this model really is, and how such domination over Life can never be truly satisfying.
It is forcing us to ask ourselves what our deepest values truly are, and to decide what we want to give precedence to, often through situations of great discomfort. It makes us contact our most ancient fears regarding our survival and it asks us to look beyond them, to see them for what they truly are – expressions of our great vulnerability, when we have not yet found a true “center” within ourselves that is in harmony with Life.
It is interesting for me to see how many people around me seem to be willing, today, to look at new ways of “thinking of life”. As always, times of great loss and great crisis push us to look beyond the surface of our lives and to go more deeply, to see what we no longer need and to free ourselves of it, so we can open up to another phase, to a next level of awareness and creativity.
From Kronos to Kairos
“Kronos” was the Greek name for Saturn, and it represents the strength, order, discipline – and tyranny – of the model of “power over” or “phallic power”. It represents the passage of Time – that for humans has always been something to be afraid of, since passing time means always that death is nearing. The passage of Time also means that nothing is stable: everything that we experience today that is beautiful, will be gone tomorrow ... and even though what is ugly won’t be here either, “This Too Shall Pass” is often experienced not as something to be embraced and accepted, but rather is seen as something to be afraid of, since it shows us clearly how Life is always moving, how unpredictable it is, and how, despite our many attempts to do so, we are completely incapable of controlling it. We can never simply sit down in the armchair and watch: sooner or later we are always called to change something, or to accept the changes that arrive, whether or not we looked for them or asked for them. And since Life asks us always to keep on changing and growing along with it, our concept of these external forces that make us continue to evolve is often negative and persecutory.
What we are called to understand, during this cycle of Saturn-Uranus oppositions, is how much this concept is indeed our own interpretation of this cosmic force, and of how much the type of power which is authoritative and rarely respectful of the dignity and the precious contributions of our own Personal Selves is not an imposition made upon us by “heaven” or by “god”, but instead represents a mere step in our evolution. It is not an ineluctable law that comes down from outside ourselves: it is a system that we have built, to give us those structures that we needed so we could reach a level of apparent security, in a world where there is rarely much security and predictability at all, due to the fact that everything is always changing, and also due to the fact that death is always waiting for us right around the bend.
The invitation, instead, is one of Kairos – of the ability to understand that behind every change, within every invitation sent to us from Life, and perhaps especially within those experiences that are difficult and painful – lies a great opportunity. Kairos was the word the Greeks coined for the fact that for everything there is an opportune moment during which one can change the circumstances. In theological rhetoric, Kairos is defined as a passing instant when an opening appears, through which one must forcefully pass if one wants to be successful.
In antiquity this ability was attributed only to an intellectual and socio-economic elite that could allow themselves the luxury of an education, and more recently it has been seen, within Christian culture, as a possibility open only to those who embraced a certain concept of “god”.
Today, instead, this invitation is open to us all. The ability to become aware of our individual importance within Life, and of our responsibility regarding our understanding of “who we are”, is no longer reserved to a fortunate few. Today we can all become capable of making those choices that make us truly grow in our ability to contribute something truly useful to ourselves, to those around to us, and to Life itself.
Therefore, this is truly an important moment for many of us, and the choices we will make will have an effect on the wellbeing of the organism we are a part of. If you are now living through great changes, whether or not they are pleasurable it is probable that the Saturn-Uranus opposition is directly influencing a planet or a sensitive point in your natal chart.
Just to add a personal example, this opposition last year “struck” head on a series of very sensitive points in my own natal chart, that at first manifested in the form of some serious health problems. It helped me, however, make some extremely important decisions with regards to my work and to how I was organizing my life in many ways (it was acting on my tenth house, the house that governs work); it “forced” me to listen to myself on a much deeper level, and it “brought” me some new and precious information that greatly aided me in making decisions that were much more in harmony with “who I am”. I must say that these discoveries were precious not only in the sense that I discovered a greater freedom: I found a greater freedom in a new, humble ability to recognize and accept things that up until then I considered personal limitations, and that for years I had attempted to modify so as to be more similar to those around me.
These changes were not devoid of moments of suffering and anguish, and they took place over the course of several months. But if I look back now, I can see how, fortunately, these “nudges” indeed helped me move forward in my own personal journey of evolution, and how, later on, they gave me the opportunity to invest my energies in completely new ways (for example, writing this article!). At the same time, I have no doubt whatsoever that had I become more rigidly attached to my old way of thinking, I would have encountered even more serious problems. And this would not have been because these cosmic energies would have “punished” me, but rather simply because I would have been refusing to listen, and to understand that the structures that had given me security up until that time had become prisons, and my deeper being could no longer stay within them without beginning to atrophy.
To go back for a moment to the concept of “phallic power”, it is important to understand how often we use this “power over” not only in our relationships with others, trying to make them be the way we would like them to be, or in our attitude towards Life, getting angry when things don’t go the way we would like them to, but how we use it especially in our relationship with ourselves. We cling to ways of thinking about life that seem to give us security, but beyond a certain point they begin to take our life away from us. If we don’t decide to be born beyond those old models, if we don’t decide to leave the reassuring “uterus” of our old convictions, we run the risk of dying inside of them, exactly like a baby would die should it refuse to leave the womb when it is time for it to do so (sometimes taking the mother along with it).
If we manage to transform this model within ourselves, if we manage to make, one at a time, choices that allow us to go deeper, more in harmony with our SELF, we not only allow our lives to go on and to continually blossom into new forms, but our decisions to evolve become an energy, an example, and a contribution of great value, not only to those closest to us, but to all of Life. These concepts are amply described by various masters and authors coming from many different cultures and traditions, but I here would like to indicate Existential Personalistic Anthropology and the works of Antonio Mercurio, its founder, that I encountered shortly before I began my adventure into Astrology (and which brought about my Anthropo-Astrology), and that have represented for me an invitation to new ways of thinking and of living that have completely transformed me over time. For further exploration of this particular viewpoint, besides the works I mentioned earlier I would like to suggest “Hypotheses on Ulysses”, available for free download on the internet at www.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Hypotheses-On-Ulysses or at my blog site www.personcenter99.blogger.com). (“The Ulysseans” and “The Cosmo-Art Theorems and Axioms”, recently translated by me into English, will also be available soon).
Astrology helps us understand how during the course of our lives, in a cyclical manner, these “invitations” to evolve and to participate in the Human-Cosmic Dance with ever greater attention and an ever more open mind come to us. While it is true that they are always there in the background, it is also true that each one of us has an individual journey, and that the when and the how we open to these evolutionary nudges and to the ability to integrate them into our own lives is highly personal. For this reason “Kronos” – Time – nonetheless remains precious and important: the appointments we make with our individual evolution are set within Time, and in this view we always get to them at the “right moment” (even though it often doesn’t seem so to us!). The wisdom of Kairos comes as we become ever more capable of embracing these invitations truly as invitations to a dance, to something that brings us forward, as occasions and opportunities to become never Tyrants of our experiences, with absolute control, but willing Co-Creators, humble, and capable of experiencing pain not as a punishment, but as an opportunity to free ourselves of our armor and to open up to the processes of Life. It can most certainly help to be aware of these cycles, and to allow the knowledge that Astrology offers regarding them to be of service to us.
I wish for everyone, and especially for those who have gone through or are going through difficult times in this period, to be able to find the love for themselves, the courage and the energy they need to follow the Kairos of this moment. It is truly a golden opportunity for all of us that is presenting itself in this life.
I do suggest, however, that you find good allies during this process, because there is no doubt that another message in this moment is one that encourages us to open up to others, not to continue dominating or be dominated, but to share the journey, to exchange strength and knowledge, to stimulate, reinforce and help each other to move forward towards a life ever more free of old concepts of power that keep us all isolated, fearful, and ever more violent in our attempts to defend our illusions of security.
As we slowly free ourselves of these ideas of security that inevitably become prisons, and we decide to walk together with others who also have the courage to go through the great trials that these choices always bring with them, we can become capable, perhaps, of creating that Beauty that Antonio Mercurio talks about, Secondary Beauty, the result of two or more people acting together to create a type of energy that the universe needs to fulfill its dream of immortality.
It is a great opportunity, it truly is.
And you, what will you decide?
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