As this week progresses, astrology’s focus (and yours) must necessarily widen to take in Mercury’s next move: an ingress to Pisces. Mercury will enter Pisces at 11:52 pm EDT Thursday (03:52 UTC Friday). That’s big news made all the bigger by the fact that Mercury has been in Aquarius a long time — since Jan. 4 or Jan. 5, depending on your time zone.

Mercury is a versatile archetype, expressing in many ways. Among other things, Mercury has to do with mind — your mind in particular. Also, Mercury correlates with the means by which thoughts and other more tangible things move in the world.

How Mercury expresses has a lot to do with the sign it’s in. Signs are to planets what costumes are to stage actors. A change of costume nearly always implies a change of role.

Regardless of where it is on the zodiac, Mercury’s role in your life has been made all the greater in this century because of the influence electronic media (an extension and expression of mind) has swiftly taken on in the world.  

On average, Mercury’s apparent motion around the zodiac circle is significantly more swift than any other celestial object except the Moon. It usually takes Mercury only a bit more than two weeks to cross from one sign cusp to the next. Hence, only a retrograde entirely within the bounds of one sign can keep Mercury acting in a single costume for more than two months.

Mercury retrogrades are common — usually three times a year, about three weeks at a time. Three weeks in reverse motion functions to take Mercury forth and back and forth again over the same arc of the zodiac three times, in a cycle lasting nearly two months. Visualize three swipes of a windshield wiper on your automobile (except in very slow motion) and you get the picture.

It is not quite common for the three swipes of any given Mercury retrograde cycle to take place entirely within the confines of one sign. It is not every year that all three Mercury retrogrades are that way. This is one of those years.

The last such year was 2012, when Mercury was first retrograde entirely in Pisces, followed by a series of swipes limited to Cancer, concluded by a cycle confined to Scorpio. All told, Mercury spent half of 2012 in those three water signs. This year, it’s the air signs: first Aquarius, then Gemini and finally Libra.

For the time being, however, Mercury is about to leave both retrograde experiences and an airy milieu behind. Soon, Mercury (and, by implication, all in your life that it corresponds with) will begin manifesting through an entirely different raiment — Pisces. It will probably take some getting used to.

What you might anticipate is something akin to discomfort — at least at first. For example, being able to hear yourself think could conceivably (and rather suddenly) become more of a challenge. That’s how you might want to work some regularly scheduled quiet times into your life by Friday. You may even want arrange some quiet space to be in over the weekend

Similarly, a discomforting message or two may come your way over the next couple weeks. If that should happen, respond so as to make things easier for yourself. Procrastination in reply will almost certainly not be a viable option. Conducting your communications consistently and carefully so as to assuage others will encourage returns in kind.

Also, as mundane as it may sound, Pisces (as a water sign) implies how all things Mercury will soon be more subject to immersion, both literally and figuratively. Since tangible water is rarely compatible with electronics, take precautions.

If it is your habit to take a cellular phone into the bathroom, try calling a moratorium on that practice. Likewise, keeping your beverages on a surface separate from your keyboard would be prudent. Finally, if by some chance you indulge in alcohol during what remains of March, you might want to refrain from dialing anybody or sending anything until sober — unless you are calling a cab or a designated driver to get you safely home.

Fortunately, with the exception of delicate electronic devices and heavy machinery operated under the influence, nearly everything else Mercury can be associated with is usually very resilient. After more than two months of Mercury in Aquarius, your mind will probably have regained its sea legs in a matter of days.

Nonetheless, it has been a long time. It would be helpful if you were aware of that. Mercury has a major part in your life. Accordingly, it makes sense to think ahead a few days, and plan for a significant transition of that role as Thursday segues into Friday.

Offered In Service

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

Your Monday Astrology Diary

By Amanda Painter

On our way to the last Uranus-Pluto square in one week, the astrology is going to keep us on our toes — intellectually, emotionally, physically. Because it’s possible to take this week’s astrology at both the macro (or philosophical) level and mundane or physical levels, I’m going to touch on several of the major aspects that are in force during the first half of this week in more or less chronological order.

Photo by Amanda Painter

Today it’s worth noting that asteroid Ceres in Capricorn is making a square to asteroid Eris in Aries (exact at 4:37 am EDT / 8:37 UTC).

Although these are technically ‘minor’ planets, they’re underscoring a notable facet of one theme of the Uranus-Pluto square (and doing so from the same two signs): the sense that some sort of revolutionary shift is underway in gender roles, and in our own inner sense of its polarity and integration.

In the case of today’s Ceres-Eris square, the astrology seems to ask, ‘What happens when our old ideas of nurturing and motherhood push up against the fragmented realities of identity we’re living in today’s world? What does it mean to be a woman (or to nurture yourself) at this point in time, in a society such as ours?’

These questions get developed as Venus exacts its conjunction to Eris in Aries on Wednesday (exact at 11:18 pm EDT / 3:18 UTC). This is also the same day Mars conjoins Uranus in Aries and squares Pluto.

On the one hand, Venus could be seen as bringing some sense of unity to Eris just as Mars gets stretched and confronted by the evolution/revolution machine. It’s like the planets are saying that maybe it takes some receptivity and love and reunification of our highest values (and of our inner feminine) to hold space for that process Mars is entering into. In one sense, ‘Masculinity’ is being overhauled, and is playing catch-up to femininity (Venus went through the Uranus-Pluto square last week).

Consider also that Eris carries an element of subversion to it (witness Eric’s favorite example of Mercury conjunct Eris: Stephen Colbert’s amazing roasting of George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner several years ago). As Eric noted in an email to me, “Love is subversive. Sex is revolutionary.”

Continue reading →

By Amanda Moreno

Somewhere around ten years ago I met a dude who recommended I read Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B and Ishmael. I did and was introduced to many ideas I’d never been able to articulate but that resonated at my own personal level of common sense. One of these was the idea that each of the world’s main religions was a salvation-based religion; religions that had, for one reason or another, been sculpted into dogmas that emphasized the inherent suffering of the human life and the need for salvation, which typically arrived from the outside.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

Indeed, the salvation myth seems to be one of those ideas that has taken an insidious and incessant stranglehold on the modern paradigm. Through a god that will come and save us, through alien beings who will either bring the return of light and knowledge or cataclysmic death, through leaders in power who need to be making better decisions, through our children who will have to pick up the slack, through a pill that can regulate blood pressure or mood or ovulation or take away symptoms from a cold so that we can go back to the grind…

Once again, as so often happens in these pieces, I’m aware of the oversimplification of the above statements. Of course, we also have memes in modern culture that support the opposite: “Be the change you wish to see in the world” comes to mind. But the ethos of waiting for salvation from above or from outside seems to mix quite nicely with the psychic overwhelm inherent in modern culture — we tend to shut down, repress or deny rather than deal with the emotions that stem from watching the war state become perpetual, glaciers dying, ignorance spreading like radiation (or radiation spreading like ignorance?)… and on, and on.

It also mixes in a really interesting way with the idea that we are each special, chosen and unique. But what will we do with our uniqueness? Display it on Facebook for personal gratification and then let others do the heavy lifting? Hm.

I recently took off for a few days to spend some time at the very cold, stark ocean of the Pacific Northwest. My intention had been to spend as much time outdoors as possible, but a cleverly timed cold made it clear my recalibration needed to be a bit more…well, internal. I did make it to the ocean each day for a period of time, and I did get to spend time with books and podcasts and writing and cooking. But there were also the hours in the evening when I just allowed myself some fallow time — with The Lord of the Rings and a few episodes of the first season of Heroes.

I definitely have a penchant for fantasy and for super-hero movies and TV shows. For one thing, there’s a level of mindless indulgence that just feels so good, partially because it’s not entirely mindless — these kinds of movies appeal to my own sense of what is possible and feelings of being different (but special, of course).

Here’s the thing, though. Salvation-based religions — Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism — have morphed to teach us that living is suffering and that we are to seek ultimate liberation from that suffering through transcending the human form in some way. Through striving to become something more than human, something purified or supernatural. Something less attached, less sinful, less dense. I suppose I can get on board with the attachment thing, but the ‘sin’ and the density? Isn’t that why we’re here?

Okay, maybe not the entire reason. But in my cosmological framework, at least as it currently exists, we incarnated here to learn about density. As for sin…well, the act of sinning is based on going against moral codes that seem to be quite set in stone — and isn’t morality more fluid than that?

The fact is, in so many of the salvation-based religions, ‘sin’ is bound up in enjoying the flesh, in enjoying being in density. I see where this can be problematic when balance is lost and gluttony occurs, but… well, orgasms sure aren’t linked primarily to procreation. They happen whether or not a baby is being conceived. Furthermore, although I do believe that the pursuit of evolving and elevating consciousness is one of our primary functions, I also believe that we, as humans, get to do that through exploring our bodies and our emotions and how they connect to the heart and the spirit.

In any case, I’m weary these days of the emphasis on external salvation. That’s not to say I don’t have my own fascination with Pleaidians or Atlantis/Lemuria or beings of light (or X-Men or Froddo Baggins) but it’s more in the sense that by learning about these stories and myths I can apply what I learn to my own experience. I can orient myself to my surroundings; whether I consider the myths to be fact or fiction is secondary to the heart-centered lessons I take away. This applies to my fascination with the Egyptian empire, or the Minoan, or the Etruscan. There is something within our history as a species that I want to learn from. But I don’t want to reify it into being more than me, or godlike.

Because, you see, what I realize is that these mythological and fantastical characters are idealized versions of ourselves, even with all of their flaws. And we cannot wait for them, or someone like them, to come save us. We have to learn from the stories, take their lessons to heart, integrate what fits using discernment and instinct, and spit out the rest so that we can become those idealized versions, complete with our flaws and our misgivings and darkness, but well aware of our gifts. So that we can, in fact, be the change we wish to see in the world. So that we can save ourselves from the inside out, or at least realize that we are perfect, in perfect time and perfect place. Whatever the hell that means.

You are special. You are unique — perhaps even the ‘Chosen One’. The thing is, though, we all are. And so we must each take the initiative to uncover and cultivate our unique gifts and bring them out, in the spirit of love and hope and some kind of grounded service. At least that’s where I sit in terms of the “why are we here living this crazy existence?” question at the moment.

By Sarah Taylor

The Fool has shown his face twice before this year — in the reading on Jan. 1, and again on Feb. 1. Here The Fool is for the third time, forming the foundation to this week’s reading. Third time’s a charm; the card’s magic is being woven.

The Fool, Queen of Swords, Prince of Swords from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

On Jan. 1, the card next to The Fool was the Ace of Swords. Today, it is the Queen of Swords, with the Prince of Swords to her right. It feels to me like the potential of the Ace — which we can choose to draw from, or not — has been made manifest, and is expressing itself actively through an aspect of the personality. This will be active in you, and it may also be mirrored to you from someone else.

What I see in this reading first and foremost, in motion specifically in The Fool and the Queen of Swords, are masks and their removal. There is a sense of your no longer needing what you have hidden behind; there is a falling away of something that you no longer need to wear. Perhaps you have noticed where you have felt you have hidden, and where there is the ability to expose and reveal your true face, layer by layer, in an act of self-declaration.

The removal of masks is your act of self-declaration and a path to freedom.

This freedom has a specific form, denoted by the court cards’ suit: Swords. Swords are associated with the mind, and therefore also thoughts, intellect, beliefs. Creatures of habit that we are, we have a propensity to form thought patterns: modes of seeing ‘what is’ through filters gathered over the course of our lifetimes, particularly in our childhoods, and shaped by people we considered, and sometimes still consider, authority figures.

Here, there is the opportunity, through the foundation of no-mind of The Fool, to identify and, if you so choose, to divest yourself of an outer enamel of beliefs that have not only shaped how you see the world — but also how the world has seen you.

Take a look at the card at centre, the Queen of Swords. Two empty-eyed, stylised masks seem to be moving away from the queen herself, with only a smaller one remaining — one that allows us to look at the lower half of her face with full mouth, and which exposes more of her eye. Part of her face is still hidden, but, now, I see her. She is beautiful, fragile yet strong. Yes, a mask remains, but the blue of it feels as if it has depth to it; it provides a striking contrast against her blonde hair. Now that I look more closely, it’s as if a tear is gathering on the rim of the lower lid of her eye. She sees more as she, in turn, allows us to see her.

The interesting thing is this: she still remains a mystery. Letting pretence fall does not make her simple. If anything, she has rendered herself more complex. As I am let into her humanness, I am also aware of a grace and dignity to her that were, also, hidden from me.

How we hide the gold along with the shadow. How you have hidden your light for fear of the darkness.

And so to the final card, on the right, in the form of the Prince of Swords. When I look at him, I see ‘birth’: he has issued from the Queen — a nascent, but strong, masculine force that feels younger, and perhaps less experienced, but whose resolve to forge his own way beats like a blue heart out of the card. His face is unmasked, though we can see only one side of it. His eye glows a blue-white. This is inner-sight, or intuition. He does not need ordinary eyes to see. His sight comes from another source: a corona edges around the blue that bubbles up from his forehead, distant in space-time. He is bonded with something that lies outside, and yet is connected with him, and he with it.

At the same time, it appears as if his focus has freed him from a different kind of bond: a chain that runs down the right-hand side of the card and past his shoulder is now broken in two places — one of them a clean break. Aided by his connection to the light, he has liberated himself.

From what? From karma. From an intergenerational yoking that is forged through blood.

Because while the Queen’s masks fall, so the Prince moves away from the Queen and into his own, as yet unknown, personal destiny. The ties that bound no longer do so in one key respect. A belief or an entrenched pattern of thought whose links you can follow into the way-back-when has lost the ability to keep you in your place. There is freedom from an outmoded dynamic that has held you in check and incognito for long enough; both the mature (inner) feminine and the younger (inner) masculine can, in some way, extricate themselves from a stultifying situation and assert their independence and find new ways to be and to move.

Never underestimate a Fool, no matter what his appearance seems to be. No-mind is not ‘mindless’. Taking that step into the unknown has precipitated an emergence — a birth — from within. You are looking through a doorway to a freedom that started out as a thought, its genesis resting in the power to imagine something different.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Fool (Uranus), Queen of Swords (the watery aspect of air), Prince of Swords (the airy aspect of air)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind,” adding that, “the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.” — Bibi Netanyahu, addressing a joint session of Congress in 1996

As we prepare to spring into daylight savings time, if not spring itself — and complete the signature energies of the 2012 astrology, culminating in the the final Uranus/Pluto square — it would be good form to huddle around the campfire in our parkas and mittens to assess where we find ourselves now. Uranus always picks us up and drops us somewhere else. Combine that with the bone-grinding transformational abilities of Pluto, and we should all be much different critters than we were just a few years ago.

Uranus acts as the harbinger for change but should not be such shocking energy, given its regularity in our human experience. Humankind is, for the most part, complacent in its affairs, long-suffering in order to maintain even the most meager comfort zones. When Uranus comes along to blast us out of that nest, it’s likely that we’ve already outgrown it like a too-tight shoe, but one we think we can’t do without. Pluto, on the other hand, works below the surface, eroding and reshaping the platform we stand on to prepare us for a new iteration of experience. If our consciousness reflects what we know, by the time a Pluto transit finishes with us we know a lot more than we did before.

In simplistic terms, then, regular Uranus/Pluto transits provide us a kind of shocking but necessary growth-spurt. Comparing the 1950s with the ’70s, for instance, leaves us with no question that something shook the culture like a dog with a bone, providing it with a very different outlook on both the world and itself. Our current challenges of both politics and culture, then, should be representative of where we’re headed in the near future.

Should be. What a concept! Truth was a little easier to sort out in the 1960s. Journalism was yet to be a commodity bought and paid for, and because history repeats and repeats and repeats, we at least have a template to review as we face what appears to be a series of interesting parallels. Let’s take the recent performance in front of both the Congress and, via media, the American people by Israeli Prime Minister (and incumbent candidate) Benjamin Netanyahu.

Invited without prior White House approval by House Speaker John Boehner, who has been somewhat reckless (read that puffed, toad-like) in defending his right to exercise such congressional overreach, Netanyahu gave an impassioned speech warning against the horrors of a nuclear Iran. It was essentially the same speech he’s given over the course of decades, twice previously to the American Congress, and — as Obama rightly assessed it — offering nothing new.

Israel’s Prime Minister gave the de facto “be afraid, be very afraid” speech, emotional and manipulative, and it brought the Republicans to their feet in wild applause some forty times in forty minutes. Bibi’s references to biblical history were made to order. As Huffpost Hill put it, “Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the goal of keeping Iran at bay is a charge of biblical proportions, making it only the 502,743rd thing Republican lawmakers think God wants them to do.”

A number of prominent Democrats refused to be strong-armed into attending the speech, including Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren. Both cite the timing of the speech, coinciding with the coming Israeli vote, and the manner in which it was arranged, while pledging solidarity with Israel proper. Associated with the right-wing Lukid faction, Bibi has come under fire at home as well as on these shores for his war-mongering in the face of Iran/American nuclear negotiation, threatening the relationship with this nation.

Even the former chief of Mossad (2002-2010) Meir Dagan has criticized his theatrics, telling the press prior to the speech that “the person who has caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel on the Iranian issue is the prime minister.” And Bill Moyers offered a harsh indictment of both the incident and Netanyahu’s motives, focusing on the presence of Jewish gazillionaire, Sheldon Adelson, in the gallery of Congress — not to be ignored, since Mrs. Adelson evidently dropped her purse from the second story onto the head of an unsuspecting Democrat. A perfect dot on the exclamation point of the money-man’s presence in Washington, given Adelson’s propaganda machine in Israel, promotion of Neocon principles, and funding of conservative U.S. candidates with an avalanche of both tracked and dark contributions.

For our purposes, the Moyers piece is Must Read, as well as this one by Professor Marjorie Cohn, offering information on another of those manipulative historical moments when emotion rather than facts seized public sensibilities. A day prior to his congressional speech, Netanyahu addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), refreshing their enthusiasm with references to the Six-Day War, in which Israel defended itself against aggressions from Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and laid claim to the Palestinian territories, which it holds to this day.

The entirety of that narrative — much like the early, highly fictionalized book of Israel’s beginnings by Leon Uris, Exodus — has been mythologized, ignoring the troublesome facts that Israel itself was the aggressor in ’67, seizing Palestinian lands with a level of brutal militarism that smacks of both genocide and war crime. Long hidden, actual facts are now available to those who wish to examine them. Proofs of such claims are irrefutable in the confessions of Israeli soldiers of that time, one of whom asks a question that could surely be asked today: “Are we doomed to bomb villages every decade for defensive purposes?”

Still, you won’t find that discussion in mainstream media, and while Israel no longer enjoys a Teflon coating against criticism, largely due to its heavy-handed policy of apartheid in the occupied territories, nor an overly sympathetic relationship with this presidential administration, the American people are easily persuaded by lofty rhetoric. A CNN poll found that Bibi gained some ground in popularity this week, and it can’t but help the Israeli cause that scenes of senseless brutality from the Boston Marathon bombing are filling the airwaves today. It’s hard to beat back the pathos of carnage and dying children.

The good news is that the polarity between those who favor more sanctions on Iran to halt the peace process and those who see that as hawkish aggression hasn’t changed the politics a whit. And while it can be argued that there are more of us looking carefully at the part that Israel plays in its own troubles fifty years later, it’s not yet enough to require a dramatic level of honesty and self-assessment from either their government or our own, in enabling them as war-makers, not peace makers. I wonder how many of us thought about the early occupations when the Towers fell and the question echoed: Why do they hate us? Maybe one of the reasons they hate us is because we looked the other way in 1967.

Another blast from the past that can’t be ignored is the Department of Justice report that leaves little to the imagination regarding police activity in Ferguson Missouri and indeed, the entirety of St. Louis County. I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did, and remain bewildered that some 49 percent of those polled this week think that cops treat whites and non-whites the same. I think it’s pretty clear that, regarding race, we’re still color blind, not in a good way. The conservative faction of the Supreme Court has made that even more problematic, of course, siding with those who presume the nation to be post-racial. That, as well, is a choice in belief and, much like Mr. Netanyahu’s version of the Six-Day War, both cynical and manipulative.

Last August, scenes of smoke and fire and snarling dogs, baton-wielding police facing off against a sea of dark faces (and dotted by the occasional pale one) were reminiscent of  grainy black-and-white images flashed on television sets around the nation in 1965. If this issue of black exploitation and denial of civil rights didn’t bring Selma to mind, then this season’s award-winning movie of the same name, produced by Oprah Winfrey in time for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the King marches, certainly did.

While we’re on the topic, then, let me manipulate your emotions a bit by including links to the music, Glory, which won an Oscar, bringing many to tears. Since you’re being manipulated by everything from Kim Kardashian’s choice of hair color to those well-meaning [sic] Koch brothers’ ads about providing good jobs for America right this minute, you might as well get a taste of the passions renewed in this on-going battle for civil liberty.

No less than the President of the United States will join in the 50th anniversary remembrance of the Bloody Sunday assault on protestors in Selma, Alabama, this weekend, as will a number of others, an estimated 20 percent of Congress including but not limited to progressive legislators. Certainly long-serving Georgia congressman John Lewis, son of sharecroppers and one of the original Freedom Riders who suffered a skull-fracture on that infamous day, will attend. Lewis commented that he sees all the parallels, then and now, with one disturbing missing piece: “The only thing that is so different [is that] today, I don’t think many of the young people have a deep understanding of the ways of nonviolent direct action.”

No ranking GOP representatives will be in Selma this weekend. I suspect that says everything we need to know about how the conservatives view this anniversary, especially in so polarized an atmosphere as we find ourselves today. And let’s remember that it wasn’t simply the treatment of black citizens being protested fifty years ago, it was also their inability to guarantee their voting rights, something still being denied them whenever possible in Republican strongholds across the nation. And while it took two more tries to make it into Montgomery, the images of racial brutality on that march are permanently seared into the consciousness of the nation. Take note of that as one of those things that wouldn’t have happened without (the dreaded) television coverage of yesteryear.

So here we are, fifty years and counting, déjà vu all over again as we stack up the dead bodies of young black kids across the nation. And while the civil rights legislation of Johnson’s era served us all to bring the black demographic into better social and financial standing, those protections are now in sharp decline due to factors such as the war on drugs and income inequality, to name just a few. And it isn’t just people of color who are being victimized by heavily militarized law enforcement. The Ferguson report shows a level of authority-gone-paranoid, therefore reckless, that transcends race to include those in poverty, unable to hire adequate defense, and — you know — “There but for the grace of God …” Essentially, we are all endangered.

Clearly, issues of racial bias are not easily dealt with, nor can they be tolerated if Lady Justice is to be blindfolded but balanced. We count upon her ability to define cultural equality, unassailed by the issues that would promote prejudice. It is BECAUSE we humans are not able to be entirely neutral arbiters of law that law itself is required. Those laws must not only be carefully crafted but enforced. As we found in 1965, they require not just update to ensure all of our citizens are receiving their constitutional rights, but enforcement carefully monitored to eliminate abuse or mismanagement.

I think we can file this one under “re-do,” as in continually re-doing that which does not meet strict legal standard, with laws carefully scrutinized (and dots connected back to voting for well-meaning and ethical lawmakers). Democracy demands a constant and perpetual re-do, as required. I would feel much better about it if I didn’t agree with John Lewis that our disdain of what is “old” and “outdated” leaves us ignorant of what worked so potently in the past. It would be well to remember how Gandhi and King and others dedicated to non-violence did the deed. Each of them spoke to the power of love to overcome great inequity.

As we continue to wrestle the big historical parallels, I’d also like to point out a few examples of positive progress this week, little bits and pieces that make up the texture in the fabric of the whole. Acknowledging the Nessus-effect, baby steps get us where we’re going even if it takes more, collectively speaking, than giant steps, and their sequence may end up covering more ground than we expect.

The most recent jobs report — adding over a quarter-million positions — still reflects salary inequalities that must be dealt with, but the economy continues to grow despite wage problems. Wall Street isn’t celebrating, though, fearful that the Fed will raise interest rates. I think we’ll look back on this period in history — when money was available for pennies on the dollar — and fault government for not taking advantage of that to shore up, mend and improve all that’s wrong with our infrastructure. Still, stabilization of the economy provides more latitude to override crippling austerity measures.

We can’t seem to agree on the science of vaccines, but it appears we’ve come to collective agreement regarding over-medicated feed-stock. McDonalds has joined the growing list of fast-food providers that will phase out use of antibiotic-fed chickens. News of the growth of drug-resistant mutant microbes has finally filtered down to the mainstream, especially parents who cave to their child’s demand for McNuggets. This is likely very good news. Like last week’s announcement that Wal-Mart was giving its employees a raise, McDonalds leads the industry — and the game remains Follow The Leader.

The Greatest Show on Earth is going to be even greater, thanks to pressure from dedicated animal activists. Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus is getting set to retire its elephant herd of 43 trained pachyderms, the largest herd in North America, to a 200-acre sanctuary in central Florida. This comes on the heels of a negotiated settlement of over a quarter-million dollars to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal welfare violations. Legislation in various cities forbidding the use of bull hooks added to the decision by Feld Entertainment Corporation.

According to their Vice President, Alana Feld, “There’s been somewhat of a mood shift among our consumers.” I think it’s pretty obvious that ‘mood shifts’ are what happens when consumers see the back story on just about everything — think of it as the rails upon which the Hundredth Monkey rides.

A blog over at Huffy gave Feld kudos on its decision and threw down the gauntlet on a parallel company who has done the exact opposite, saying, “Your move, SeaWorld.” If they’re smart, they’ll re-think their bid to create even more space for their whales while maintaining the cute-Shamu-tricks that made them rich, the whales psychotic, and the trainers dead.

One last note, with a nod to recent polls that show most people now know what a Mercury retrograde is: as the Dawn space probe entered orbit around Ceres, noting that it is very round and not like Vesta (which apparently has the appearance of a squashed dinner roll) the world has finally been introduced to dwarf planets. One never knows how this information will be met, but what becomes part of the public conversation always translates into dots connecting us together, somewhere. Perhaps, investigating, some will find Planet Waves who need to be here, perhaps even some who just learned about Mercury retrogrades.

We’re at an interesting juncture now, awaiting the last of the Uranus/Pluto energy, solidifying what we’ve learned. A work in progress, examining what we’ve re-experienced, reviewed, resolved and preparing to move ahead with it. What will that mean to those who don’t want things to change, even though they already have? What will that look like to those who insist on change, even though it feels like their feet are mired deep in concrete?

What last important happenings await us in our journey toward solid footing? Life happens while we’re busy making other plans, and only in looking back do we see how we took the steps necessary for progress, seldom seen while we’re taking them.

Like weather, change happens on a regular schedule. Like lightning, emotions assault us, shake us and wake us up. Like evolution, baby steps take us forward slowly but surely. And those who think that the chicken came before the egg might also suggest that it’s the leaders of the country calling the tune — but not, I think, during those exciting years under Uranus/Pluto aspects. One of life’s mysteries is how slowly time can go while folding on itself at the same time, how stress can be glorious and peace boring. We’re going to miss this transit when it’s gone.

Our collective power to sway the whole of the conversation remains just outside of our peripheral vision, as if we’re afraid to know how powerful we truly are. We’ve created the emerging outcome, we’ve crafted it for its lessons and its opportunities. Now we’ll see what we’ve produced.

I’m confident we’ve changed enormously in the last few years, sensitizing ourselves to one another and opening our hearts, and it won’t be long before we find out how that’s going to look. I’m just hoping it doesn’t involve paisley.