22/02/2015
In March we have two events as markers on our paths. The first is the final Pluto-Uranus square in the series that started in 2011. Pluto represents metamorphic change, the art of becoming who you really were all along - I realize that sentence may be confusing, so I'll explain this. Butterflies and moths start out as tiny, tiny eggs that hatch. The caterpillars eat and grow, eat and grow over and over. They need to shed their skins from time to time as they outgrow them. With the Monarch butterfly, each new skin is different from the previous one, almost as though a new creature is showing itself. After all the skin-shedding is completed, stage by stage, the catterpillar eats till it's clearly full then gets restless. It will wander off, "go for a walk" until it finds the just-right place. It anchors itself to the spot chosen, then the magic starts: a wild dance follows and what emerges this time is a jewel-case, a beautiful translucent green with gold spots. It hangs in place a few weeks and gradually changes colour: something dark seems to be inside the jewel-case and one day the creature inside breaks out and behold: what emerges is a butterfly. Crumpled wings, swollen body. It needs to hang there until the fluid in its body pumps up the wings. As they straighten out the insect's body becomes slender. The winged creature doesn't resemble in the slightest the caterpillar that created its own cocoon only weeks earlier. This is metamorphic change in action: a creature becoming what it always was.
During the past four years we have been offered the opportunity again and again to become our own best butterfly: to become who we have always been (but didn't realize it, mostly; we were so busy being caterpillars we hadn't given any thought to flight. . . ) That's the Pluto part of this series of squares.
The Uranus part? I consider Uranus to symbolize going beyond. Saturn was the outermost planet humanity knew about until Herschell noticed something odd going on up in the heavens in the 18th Century. He discovered the "new planet" - which had always been there - and so our awareness of the outer boundaries of our family of planets expanded. If Saturn is structure and form then Uranus is going beyond what we thought were the natural boundaries of (insert your own item here: relationships, social structures, thought, good health, longevity. . . . are just some examples)
Now the negative of Pluto is obsession, knowing what's right for others whether they agree or not (!), brute force; the negative of Uranus is erratic and disruptive behaviour, misuse of the forms and structures available, amongst many others. We choose. These last four years have been our time of choosing. With this final square, what we have put in place will be what we have to work with, or work against. If we chose well, repeatedly throughout the time the seven squares were forming, we've grown in ways we didn't realize we could. If we chose badly, we live with those consequences and find out all the ways those were bad choices. An example, to bring it into the real world, would be ignoring indebtedness repeatedly until it got so big that borrowing to repay the debt looked like an answer. Or running sweatshops with forced labour and appalling pay and conditions. You can't get more out of some conditions. You have to go beyond your former mind-set or point of view, get the biggest perspective you can find and trust that will take you beyond the stuck place you've found yourself in. Change direction. Pay your dues and grow into a bigger self than you knew you were.
That's my rant for the day ;) Cheers, all namaste