DREAMS: A few nights ago I was back at the gleaming coal mine that the Mayan Dream Tribe had previously taken me to (coal – co-all). Or rather I was hovering above it, feeling my cells struggling to realign themselves so that I could flow deeper into the earth; at the same time I felt the Mayans magnetizing me, pulling at me. There was the sense, ‘this is the safe place’. When I woke and reconstructed the dream, my thought was that they were trying to show me how to pass out of my body into something like my immortality, and encouraging me to share this with others. Then a night or two later, the dream came back with an image of the corona virus, in which all the little projections were individuals and groups trying to escape, to take care of themselves. Instead, I saw energy lines – again associated with the Mayan Dream Tribe – pulling from within at the tips of the projections, reversing their trajectories, and drawing them back into the interior. I heard the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno: The Way In Is The Way Out.
March 19 Spring Equinox; March 24 Aries New Moon
The energies of the Spring Equinox not only describe the coming season, but, with the Sun moving into the first sign of the zodiac, foreshadow the coming year as a whole. The Sun is our creative force, the will to forge the future. The Aries New Moon is descriptive of our underlying mood, the emotional gestalt with which we begin the year. Coming five days apart, the basic celestial pattern is very similar. With the Equinox Moon in Aquarius, but square Venus in Taurus, we can foresee a year in which we reach for our hopes, dreams, ideals and aspirations, but are fearful of losing the old and familiar, especially in terms of friends and allies. Both Equinox and New Moon feature a solar conjunction with Chiron, the Wounded Healer. No surprise that the coronavirus is bringing up fears not only around our own health, but the health of our planet. There are two widespread theories over the origins of the virus. The first official theory is that it comes from bats, whose populations world-wide are threatened, and which are often eaten in Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged. It may be no surprise that bats are a shamanic totem – in the tarot, the hanged man – of life turned upside down. The alternate conspiracy theory alleges that the virus escaped from a weapons laboratory. In either case, the underlying meaning of ‘virus’ is something like ‘vie r us’ – our struggle with ourselves and each other. Putting that back into the astrological context, The Equinox and New Moon’s conjunction with Chiron represents a year in which we are facing a healing crisis. Saturn’s shift into Aquarius may signal a heightened contrast of ideological positions, as individuals, governments and religions argue about ‘what the truth is’. Will we be pulled apart, or will we pull together.
VI(e) R US
Donald Trump: “It’s a Chinese virus.”
Chinese: “The American military did it.“
The ball represents the Feminine (collective, universal);
The projections represent the Masculine (individual, me).
When there are too many ‘me’s,
we have a crisis (cry sis, cry sister, cry for assistance).
The New Moon also squares the Lunar Nodes (points at which the Moon circling the earth crosses the ecliptic, up or down). The Nodes represent our collectives: families, teams, tribes, religions, support systems – all changing. Jupiter, Pluto and Mars are conjunct in late Capricorn: the substructures of our economic and political systems require deep and broad revisions if we are to survive, and not tear ourselves apart. Anger plays a major role, as people will be forced to either give up or defend long-held limiting beliefs. Even as I write this, I have received a message from my Spanish teacher in Guatemala, with whom I communicate by Skype: she has to cancel today’s session because of an emergency meeting at the restaurant where she works as a barrista: the restaurant is dependent on the tourist trade, and the country is now in quarantine. This is a single mother in her thirties with two teenage daughters and a mother to support. Her dream is to eventually have her own Spanish language school, but right now she needs the income from the restaurant. Or, well, maybe she doesn’t, because, as she also noted, the shops are emptying out – there’s nothing to buy.
Our world is in upheaval. The crisis obviously more immediate in some places than others. Is this only a preliminary round? We don’t know yet. Are there technological innovations we can still make to ward off the worst case scenarios? This Equinox/New Moon, with the conjunction to Chiron (again, the Wounded Healer) is a shout of ‘Physician Heal Thyself!’ (In one of those non-coincidence typos, I first wrote, ‘Physician Heal Thy elf!’) What is the ‘elf’ that needs healing? Our s-elf(ishness). If we don’t learn to live for others beyond ourselves, it isn’t only the NBA and the cruise ships that may have their seasons canceled.