This month, in these very days, each of us on the planet is experiencing a grand conjunction in the sign Taurus. It is a physical event that works regardless of the details of one's individual astrological chart. A grand conjunction is a lot of planets all piled up on top of one another, almost like a string of beads in space, straight on top of our heads; but these are rather large beads.
At its heart is a conjunction between Jupiter, the largest known planet (about 1,300 times the size of the Earth) and Saturn (about 900 times bigger than the Earth). The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction occurs once every 20 years, very predictably at the turns of the even decades: for example, the most recent ones happened in 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960 and 1980. But this time, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are involved in the mix, which covers all the ancient planets. And there's a new planet, one rather akin to a rocket engine, a new "centaur" planet called 1994TA joining the fun, along with a special dark and mysterious point ignored by most astrologers, called Admetus.
...My colleague Martha Lang Wescott, in a phone call last night, summed it up as an astrological earthquake. It is, she said, deep, wide, and simultaneously full of intense pressure and hard-headed resistance. Looked at another way, the conjunction is a thundering entrance into a new era in personal and collective history. Jupiter-Saturn usually is, as you can tell from a quick survey of the years in which it happened. It would, in short, be wise to view this time in your life as an opportunity; and to consciously ask yourself how you want to cash in one huge wildcard chance to be free.
But specifically, what does it all mean? Well, what are you going through at the moment? The astrology of an era or of an especially charged-up moment is directly reflected in our personal experiences. It is true that we're trained to ignore cosmic realities, to keep our nose to the ground and work like slaves to pay the bills. It is true that we have created every imaginable diversion to discovering who we are, and yet somehow hope against hope that in the midst of our maze, we will make some amazing self-discovery. It is also rather true that deep within, we often fear that if we digress one inch from being "well-behaved people," some version of God, be it the God of Abraham or your student loan holder, will strike you dead.
...We usually exist within a kind of tightly-strung framework from which it's very difficult to escape; our beliefs are more or less crystallized, and that framework is precisely a grid of beliefs about life. Most of us, to some extent or to a great extent, feel trapped, often in some combination of our own mental patterns, in economic situations, in careers we don't want, in time and/or energy crunches, in personal relationships, in family situations and commitments, in ideas about who we are supposed to be, or under the weight of the past. You could say that "the weight of the past" sums up very neatly all the other patterns that I listed before it. And we also feel trapped in the desires we cannot fulfill -- like the desire to read books, for example, or to cook your own dinner, or to get across town and see an art exhibit, or to finally get to Ireland. Rarely is there time, and for those who have time, rarely is there money.
I don't mean to speak for everyone here. There is a significant "claim back your life" movement afoot, and I've met some very impressive members of that unofficial movement. I love the stories of people who travel the world for nothing, who acquire junky old sail boats and fix them up and live on them, or who hitch rides on private jets. But I also know that I speak for many people who are somehow living outside their own reality, and who truly, desperately want to get back into who they are, or discover who they can be.
