Venus Turns Ret­ro­grade, July 22 to Sep­tem­ber 3

It seems quite time­ly for our solar jour­ney through Leo this year that we also begin today to expe­ri­ence a won­der-filled oppor­tu­ni­ty to realign our expe­ri­ence of val­ue, beau­ty, and love. Venus turns ret­ro­grade today, turn­ing direct on Sep­tem­ber 3, and mov­ing from the 29^th to the 12^th degree of Leo. Venus ret­ro­grades once every 18 months for around 40 days, so it is one of the rar­er oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­vid­ed by the “dance of the planets”.

Of course, no plan­et “goes back­ward”, and for an inner plan­et like Venus it is formed by Venus pass­ing Earth, like a rac­er over­tak­ing anoth­er rac­er on the inside track, in her orbit around the Sun. But of course, what you and I need to under­stand is what does this means for us here on Earth; what can we learn or under­stand about our jour­ney from this sto­ry of Venus now?

Venus is the avatar of our expe­ri­ence of val­ue, the ves­sel for your appre­ci­a­tion for the hier­ar­chy of val­ues in your life, hold­ing your expe­ri­ence of all the many forms of beau­ty, and it equal­ly shapes the embod­i­ment for your per­son­al forms of love too. In your own chart, what­ev­er sign Venus is in will hold your expe­ri­ence of your per­son­al val­ues and love.

But for all of us, when­ev­er Venus is mov­ing through Leo as it is now, we are made more aware and sen­si­tive about the Leo expe­ri­ence of and approach to val­ue, beau­ty, and love. Venus in Leo cen­ters our expe­ri­ence of val­ue as being root­ed in our need to love and cre­ate with the divine light of self-ful­fill­ment. We are here to be true to our­selves, and this authen­tic­i­ty is forged and pre­served by your uncon­di­tion­al love for your­self and in your uncon­di­tion­al love for one another.

The ques­tion you are being asked with Venus ret­ro­grade is are you being true and authen­tic? Are you being true to your deep­est nature, so that your per­for­mances, your cre­ations, and your love for anoth­er is gen­uine and anchored in your love of your­self and equal­ly by your respect for one another.

But if your cre­ations and actions are cir­cum­scribed and cal­i­brat­ed so as to gain the approval of oth­ers, when you seek to get the love that you believe you lack, so that you must get it from anoth­er, then you will hear the applause but know it is not for you, and no mat­ter how much they seem to love you, it will not heal your heart.

Venus ret­ro­grade in Leo is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to go with­in and see your­self more tru­ly, to love and respect who you are. And then with this under­stand­ing of truth and beau­ty, you will go out and show a greater love and respect to those with whom you share this life. You will stretch your­self to become more of your true self, you will free your spir­it to soar into the as yet unknown heights, and by this you will reveal the love that shines at the heart of one and all. And when you do this, you will be seen and loved for who you are, a spark of the Divine.

What this means is that you will spend the next few weeks reex­am­in­ing your own val­ues, con­sid­er­ing your own means of self-real­iza­tion, of cre­ativ­i­ty and lead­er­ship. And by this you will find that you will equal­ly need to con­sid­er the val­ues you share with oth­ers, the val­ues that you make, share, and live through one anoth­er. The prin­ci­pal ques­tion will be the one of respect, respect for your­self, respect for one another.

From this gift of Venus ret­ro­grade, good rela­tion­ships will get bet­ter, dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ships may be repaired and healed. And for those rela­tion­ships where the bridge of shared val­ues has been erod­ed or bro­ken, it may sig­nal a time for each of you to let go of that form of rela­tion­ship altogether.

Sun Enters Leo

Today we mark two shifts in the “Hous­es of the Holy Ones”. The Sun leaves Can­cer and enters Leo, and on the same day Venus turns ret­ro­grade in Leo too. The dance of the plan­ets is shift­ing tunes now, and you should pay atten­tion to the oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges that are pre­sent­ed to you by your com­pan­ions in the stars.

Of course, we must take spe­cial care, and we know that this is true even more than it was before, to con­sid­er what we might encounter in the phys­i­cal weath­er we meet with day after day. And that is why we lean upon and rely upon sci­ence, along with our own intu­ition­al nature, to nav­i­gate the dynam­ic dance of the ener­gy forms that form our ever-chang­ing weath­er pat­terns, and cope as well with the larg­er cli­mate changes we are cer­tain­ly expe­ri­enc­ing now.

But there are many dimen­sions in this uni­verse, and many types of ener­gy-forms that form and shape what we expe­ri­ence here on the Earth. For us, the Dance of the Plan­ets forms the great “Sto­ry of Spir­it”, with our Earth trav­el­ling around the Sun, and then in com­bi­na­tion our plan­e­tary com­pan­ions danc­ing with one anoth­er and with us, they form intri­cate pat­terns of mean­ing and inspi­ra­tion that can guide and inspire us as we walk the path of light which forms our spir­i­tu­al awakening.
One of the prin­ci­pal shapers of our awak­en­ing is the year­ly jour­ney of our Earth around the Sun, as it forms not only one of the pri­ma­ry dri­vers of our phys­i­cal forms of weath­er, but equal­ly forms or informs our spir­i­tu­al-psy­cho­log­i­cal jour­ney of humanity’s awakening.

You have spent the last 30 days with your star mov­ing through the space of Can­cer, and the oppor­tu­ni­ty you met in the first of the Water Signs was to find your way to the cen­ter of you, to tru­ly feel the warm embrace and con­nec­tion with what lies at the heart of you, (and as you go deep­er and deep­er, what lies at the heart of one and all). In hav­ing met with your “self that is your cen­ter”, it is in this time of Leo, and cer­tain­ly some­where always in your own chart too, that you know you must be you. In Leo you strive to release your true self, as you stretch your­self upon the stages of the world, to live and embody the life divine, and reveal to one and to all who you are, which is a cre­ator, a leader and lover of life, as you shine like the star that you are.

Yes, it is in Leo that you stretch into the undis­cov­ered nature of who you might be and become, you attempt a new form of expres­sion, an exten­sion of your­self into new spaces, into new roles, new dances of spir­it, new ways of being “you”. And if you can do it, if you reach that high­er mark, then oth­ers see these gifts of the cre­ator in you and they smile, and they laugh, and yes, it is all about this, they love who you are. Because this is the heart of it, this is what is in your soul and out there now for the world to see too, it is the Spark of the Divine, pure uncon­di­tion­al love made man­i­fest by the cre­ator that is you.

For­ev­er some­where in your chart, and espe­cial­ly at this time of the year, you cel­e­brate the spark of the Divine whose cen­ter is “Every­where” and whose cir­cum­fer­ence is “Nowhere”, for you are one of ones of the One, danc­ing these songs of Spir­it in every step that you take through the won­der that is Creation.

And when you are true to your­self, then you shine like the star that you are, radi­ant with the joy and the love that is your spark of the Divine. But just like the stars in the fir­ma­ment above, your light divine will not, does not, and can­not ever shine alone. You feel this in your heart, and you know this in your soul, that you were made for one anoth­er, and you make one anoth­er who and what you are. So that every one of us is who they are because of the love we have for one anoth­er, for the love we share with one anoth­er, and so you can only be you if you live with love for one another.

For this is the heart of the teach­ing, you are made of love, and you are here quite sim­ply to love one anoth­er. It is in your space of Leo, and always at this time of the year, that you see the won­der in all of the cre­ations of Cre­ation. And what is that? It is the One, the Cre­ator, it is the Divine, which is shin­ing in every­thing and every­one, illu­mined by the Love of the One.

Astro­log­i­cal Mus­ings — Mid-Year Review: Plu­to, Nep­tune, and Uranus (June 18, 2023)

(If you wish to lis­ten to the show instead, here is the link on BlogTalk or Apple Pod­casts)

As we approach the mid­dle of our civ­il cal­en­dar year in July, (but for us who fol­low “the stars” we mark this moment as hav­ing reached only one quar­ter of our Astro­log­i­cal year), I thought it would be help­ful to refresh our under­stand­ing of the var­i­ous plan­e­tary influ­ences and their mes­sages for us this year. As I have not­ed, the orbits of the plan­ets around our star, what I like to call “the dance of the plan­ets”, with their hier­ar­chi­cal and unfold­ing pat­terns, and their inter­sec­tions with one anoth­er, what we Astrologers call “aspects”, pro­vide us with a very rich source for the mean­ings and con­texts of what shapes our lives, and they can shine a light of some greater of less­er illu­mi­na­tion upon the unfold­ment or tim­ing of the sig­nif­i­cant phas­es in our human jour­ney here upon the Earth.

I will always stress that the plan­e­tary place­ments and motions do not “make” any par­tic­u­lar event or cir­cum­stance “hap­pen”. Sim­i­lar align­ments and pat­terns were tak­ing place thou­sands, tens of thou­sands and cer­tain­ly mil­lions of years ago. It is not pos­si­ble for us to under­stand what that might have meant to the var­i­ous life-forms liv­ing on the Earth long, long ago. All we can do is bring to bear our human con­scious­ness, our type of aware­ness and under­stand­ing of our­selves and the worlds around us; and, as we observe this dance of the plan­ets, as we have for many, many thou­sands of years mar­veled at the beau­ty of the stars above, we are able to see if what occurs “above” forms a cor­re­spon­dence with what hap­pens “below”. By this aware­ness of our rela­tion­ship with our fel­low celes­tial com­pan­ions, we may hope­ful­ly gain a greater under­stand­ing and per­haps even some wis­dom that comes from this inspi­ra­tion by these greater beings with whom we trav­el around our star, and to rec­og­nize and find sig­nif­i­cance, mean­ing and guid­ance for our human lives, as we cre­ate our sto­ry and dance with one anoth­er here on Earth.

So, as we have done before, let us begin with the out­er­most and most sig­nif­i­cant influ­encers (and I would argue these influ­encers as being much more impor­tant than those fea­tured on YouTube, Insta­gram or Tik­Tok!), let us con­sid­er these great com­pan­ions in our human jour­ney through the stars, and by that I mean let us review the mes­sages and mean­ings being impart­ed to us by the plan­ets Plu­to, Nep­tune, and Uranus.

Though we can and do look at each of these three as hav­ing their own spe­cif­ic role or place in the hier­ar­chy of Astro­log­i­cal influ­ences, I find it quite impos­si­ble, as you know, I find it impos­si­ble to tru­ly under­stand any one of them with­out also con­sid­er­ing the oth­er two as well. For they form what we might call a “Trip­tych of mean­ing”, as at the deep­est lev­el for me they are the Avatars of the Tri­ad of Spir­it, so that Plu­to, Nep­tune, and Uranus are the Will, Love, and Mind of the One. Their jour­ney through the Signs, and their series of aspects that they form with one anoth­er, cre­ate this most fun­da­men­tal Song of Spir­it for our solar sys­tem, and so equal­ly for us humans here upon the Earth.

Plu­to
For our pur­pos­es today, let us begin with Plu­to and its cycle of mean­ing for us now. Dur­ing 2023 Plu­to is begin­ning to move from Capri­corn into Aquar­ius, herald­ing a new peri­od of Pluto’s influ­ence for our world. Dur­ing Pluto’s time in Capri­corn since 2008 (and that con­tin­ues through parts of this year too), we have wit­nessed the break­ing down of the insti­tu­tion­al order that was found­ed in the lat­ter part of the 1700’s and first half of the 1800’s (that is, when Plu­to moved through Aquar­ius from 1778 to 1798, then Pisces from 1798 to 1853, and then final­ly into Aries from 1823 to 1853).

That means what we are expe­ri­enc­ing from 2023 to 2044, is that it should car­ry or have some of the same mean­ing­ful­ness, hold some of the same mes­sages and offer some of the same oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges as our ances­tors faced from 1778 to 1798, which is when Plu­to then as now focused its alchem­i­cal influ­ence through the lens of the mean­ings held by the Sign of Aquar­ius. What might that be?

The heart of Aquar­ius con­cerns the very nature of our hopes and dreams, which are forged and formed by the quin­tes­sen­tial qual­i­ty of our very nature in being human. That we are made human by the nature, qual­i­ty and type of our fam­i­lies, our fel­low­ships, and our com­mu­ni­ties, by the type of social con­structs we form to meet our needs for our­selves and for one anoth­er, and that we are the very means for our indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive self-ful­fill­ment. What is at the heart of Aquar­ius is the future of who and what we will be, what kind of future are we mak­ing, what will our children’s, children’s lives be like, what kind of world will they have because of what we did and how we did it.

Since 2008, the insti­tu­tion­al struc­tures of the world have been warped and bent by their own inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions as well as by the exter­nal pres­sures brought about through his­tor­i­cal changes. Many insti­tu­tions met this moment and were found to be defi­cient or failed, some were test­ed and held to their intent and pur­pose, but they were changed (and are still chang­ing). But around the world humans have won­dered why, why now does it seem like the world, my world, is “falling apart”?

The answer quite sim­ply put is this, we are expe­ri­enc­ing this because it “is time”, as it also was in the 1700’s and the 1500’s, (and times before and times to come). That is because no struc­ture or sys­tem can remain for all time when the whole pur­pose behind cre­ation, embed­ded in the very nature of Spir­it, that all of life is dri­ven by the fun­da­men­tal imper­a­tive which is “to be and to become”, to move from one form of real­iza­tion and then into another.

The insti­tu­tions forged in the late 1700’s and 1800’s, these forms of meet­ing our needs were made to meet the needs of human­i­ty at that time. But we have changed, our dreams have changed, and the sys­tems we have to meet our needs must change too.

What Plu­to in Aquar­ius will show us is that it is not just the form that was wrong. It was not mere­ly a prob­lem with the sys­tems or struc­tures, because they did in fact “solve” the chal­lenges at their found­ing. But this is also true, those very solu­tions equal­ly cre­at­ed the very prob­lems and crises we now face. The real ques­tion we need to face now is what is the dream of human­i­ty, what will be at the heart of our dream for “a good life”?

What will form those dreams of that future “good life” is most cer­tain­ly being shaped by our new­ly “redis­cov­ered” under­stand­ing that all of life, that all of cre­ation here on Earth is inter­de­pen­dent and pre­cious, that the great­est rich­ness of this plan­et is life itself, and we should be “all for one and one for all”, yes humans, but for all of life as well.

What became the mantra for our so-called mod­ern world was the pur­pose of life was hav­ing “more of more”, lead­ing to end­less con­sump­tion as an eco­nom­ic way of being, and that has led to the wide­spread destruc­tion of the hier­ar­chies of life to meet our wants. This path of wan­ton destruc­tion has final­ly been met with the incon­tro­vert­ible Truth, which is that we can now see that there is a finite nature of what the Earth and all her life forms can sus­tain­ably con­tin­ue to sup­port so that we all may thrive. We need less quan­ti­ties in our life and more mean­ing­ful qual­i­ties of liv­ing with all of life.

Nep­tune
What Plu­to will bring every time to every realm is trans­for­ma­tion, as it holds the dri­ver of Cre­ation which is Alche­my, which we know and expe­ri­ence as the great cycling of Birth-Death-Rebirth. But Nep­tune is also part of the sto­ry, and it has been offer­ing anoth­er song in the cho­rus of spir­it to guide our steps in this time of change too. Since 2011 and con­tin­u­ing until 2026, we have been inspired and con­fused, we have expe­ri­enced illu­mi­na­tions as the veils between worlds thins, and equal­ly found our­selves stum­bling into shad­ows and fears, and all of this has been her­ald­ed by the pas­sage of Nep­tune through the Sign of Pisces. The bound­aries between the realms of Cre­ation, from the dens­est of phys­i­cal planes on up to the most ethe­re­al realms of con­scious­ness and spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tions have become more ten­u­ous, and great visions and trou­bling delu­sions have been thrown into our under­stand­ing of our world. We have watched and won­dered as our par­a­digms of belief have been warped and bro­ken, as our bound­aries between truth and fan­ta­sy, between what is fact and fic­tion have dis­solved and we have become unteth­ered from our for­mer cer­tain­ties in faith or sci­ence. We find our­selves in a time in which it seems that any­thing may be true, and yet noth­ing is what it seems. As Yeats famous­ly observed as world events seems to unrav­el and plunge us into ever greater clouds of despair and fears, we humans seem to divide between, “The best lack all con­vic­tion, while the worst / Are full of pas­sion­ate intensity”.

We can look to oth­er times when Nep­tune was in the sign of Pisces to gain some insight as to how we might under­stand the oppor­tu­ni­ties and dan­gers for us now. Two of Nep­tune pre­vi­ous pas­sages might pro­vide us with some insight. The time most like our own was from 1521 to 1535, as it was also a time with Plu­to in Capri­corn. I have described that peri­od as being much like ours, as an end of an age, where the Insti­tu­tion­al order was break­ing down and the Ide­o­log­i­cal realms were dis­solv­ing as well, where both the realms Sec­u­lar and Sec­tar­i­an were com­ing undone, where Civ­il Soci­ety and the Ideas that sup­port­ed it were rent asun­der, so that that the Civ­il and Reli­gious orders clashed over the realms of Church and State, and a strug­gle between col­lec­tive beliefs and indi­vid­ual con­science prevailed.

More recent­ly, Nep­tune was in Pisces from 1848 to 1862, and around the world in Europe and in Asia, and cer­tain­ly here in the USA, the under­stand­ing of what it means to be human, of how we should guide our rela­tion­ships with our fel­low humans, what­ev­er their ori­gins, what­ev­er their beliefs, to see one anoth­er as equal or unequal, led in the USA to the exis­ten­tial strug­gle over slav­ery in the Civ­il War. The clear­ly defined schism between one cul­ture and life­way and anoth­er was brought to a cli­max, and we thought the issue had been met and mas­tered, or at least that is what we told our­selves. Yes, Nep­tune is the Avatar that holds our beliefs, which we share in our sto­ries about one anoth­er. But the sto­ry of our strug­gle for jus­tice, equal­i­ty and equi­ty was not near­ly done, not at all.

In our cur­rent peri­od we have watched as the com­mon­ly held truths of soci­ety have again been erod­ed, ques­tioned and in some cas­es over­whelmed by a cacoph­o­ny of half-truths, con­spir­a­to­r­i­al imag­in­ings and delib­er­ate decep­tions that have spread through­out the minds of so very many by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of data streams with no appar­ent anchor­ing to some cen­tral beliefs root­ed in core val­ues and spir­i­tu­al truths. The very same ideals and half-truths have erupt­ed once more, for we real­ly did not over­come fears, and we find our­selves divid­ed once again.

Uranus
What Plu­to holds is the spir­i­tu­al truth of the unfold­ment of Cre­ation as the Alchem­i­cal Trans­for­ma­tion of Union and Rebirth; what Nep­tune holds is the spir­i­tu­al truth of the Com­mu­ni­ty of belief, of our sto­ry about our­selves and our world, (where we should ulti­mate­ly know that there is but One Spir­it), and we are here for one pur­pose only, which is to “love one anoth­er”. But the third Avatar of the Tri­ad of Spir­it, Uranus, holds for us the equal­ly insis­tent spir­i­tu­al dri­ve which is for Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and Free­dom. The way I like to under­stand these three Avatars of Spir­it is that we are all upon the path of awak­en­ing in which we are learn­ing to live with­in our Cen­tered Wills, formed by our Uncon­di­tion­al Love and guid­ed by our ever-Freer Minds.

From 2018 to 2026, Uranus for us now is mov­ing through the Sign of Tau­rus, which we under­stand as the ves­sel of Val­ue, the hold­er of why, what, and how we form our world of val­ues. We can again have some per­spec­tive or under­stand­ing of what our peri­od asks of us by look­ing at the pre­vi­ous times of Uranus in Tau­rus, 1768 to 1775, 1851 to 1859 and 1935 to 1942.

The pas­sage in the 1700’s man­i­fest­ed in a mount­ing clash of ideas over the val­ue of authoritarian/monarchial rule ver­sus the cause of lib­er­ty and self-rep­re­sen­ta­tion lead­ing up to the begin­ning of our Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War in 1775. The peri­od of the 1850’s marked the time of our great strug­gle over the val­ue of our con­cep­tion of whether humans are equal or not, as the slave­hold­ing states strug­gled with the non-slave states as to whether future states would be admit­ted as “slave” or “free”, with that ques­tion being “answered” by our Civ­il War. The mid-1930’s to ear­ly 1940’s saw the strug­gle over whether, after the fail­ure of unregulated/unrestrained cap­i­tal­ism in the Great Depres­sion, how much of a role the gov­ern­ment should play in pro­vid­ing for the com­mon wel­fare, of our com­mon val­ues, as the USA found a mid­dle path between the ide­olo­gies of Fas­cism and Communism.

In the present Uranus pas­sage in Tau­rus, our the strug­gle over val­ues con­tin­ues as we find that the end of the strug­gle between Cap­i­tal­ism and Com­mu­nism, between the East and the West, that the West sup­pos­ed­ly won, has led to a world where the pro­lif­er­a­tion of more wants and the pro­duc­tion of more goods, and more wants and more goods, has led to the world-wide destruc­tion of life-forms and ecosys­tems on the plan­et. We have made a world where the val­ue that has only quan­ti­ty as a qual­i­ty, is destroy­ing all the oth­er val­ues of life on the plan­et and we find a lack of mean­ing­ful­ness in our lives.

Uranus-Nep­tune-Plu­to
So, it would seem that we are from Uranus hav­ing to reassess our val­ues once more, and from Nep­tune to recon­sid­er our rela­tion­ship to our fel­low humans and to all life-forms as being part of the greater com­mu­ni­ty of Spir­it, while Plu­to in com­bi­na­tion with these oth­er two of the Tri­ad of Spir­it will once again bring about a strug­gle over what our Hopes and Dreams will be now for the future world we are cre­at­ing for our descen­dants. Will they hon­or us, or will they not?

Though we may at times feel that these chal­lenges and ques­tions posed to us, the very exis­ten­tial strug­gles we find our­selves trou­bled by are over­whelm­ing and unsolv­able, we must remem­ber that the way the world is today, that is of our own mak­ing. Our ances­tors long ago, and we in this present day, have made and our mak­ing choic­es that have cre­at­ed these chal­lenges, and there­in lies our hope.

We can change; we must be the change.

The future for our­selves and for all life-forms on this plan­et depends upon us.

Let us meet this moment we made with courage, with love and with the faith that comes from under­stand­ing that we have with­in us the means to make a bet­ter world for one and for all.