When Dark Days Dawn

A photograph of Guatemala's Volcan de Fuego taken back

in October 1974 by Paul Newton of the Smithsonian Institute

(photo in public domain)

About a week ago (on September 8th) a volcano erupted in my life. Then this week, a real volcano erupted in Guatemala as over in the Middle East and Africa, violence erupted like some emotional lahar which overcame those standing anywhere near its flow.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on all this for the past few days. Then just this morning, I got an email from a friend. Her life had been totally disrupted by – of all things – FedEx.

You know…the when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight people.

Yes, that FedEx. Usually the soul of reliability, FedEx has evidently done an absolutely, positively fine job of screwing up my friend’s week.

Being an astrologer of the definitely universal kind, this all got me to thinking. And yes, my friend (thank you SC) got me to report to the keyboard and write. (Actually, I’ve been here all week, working on a client consultation. But it makes for good blog drama, right?)

My own onslaught of torrential nastiness having been first in line here, I dialed my software back. The (male) friend I had an outbreak of hostilities with had been getting testy with me throughout the prior week, so I pushed back to September 3rd – Labor Day here in the US.

And lo, what did my wandering astrologer’s eye spy on screen?

As of September 3rd, Black Moon Lilith conjuncted the lunar South Node (with Sphinx in attendance) at 29 Taurus. This is a picture of society or social groups going with what’s easy. In Taurus, it’s about ‘fortunes’ or the fortunate.

 As it happens, my 2nd house cusp is at 28 Taurus.

By September 8th, Juno was in conjunction with the North Node at 28 Scorpio…

 Come September 8th, Juno had conjuncted the North

Node...which had cycled back into 28 Scorpio (putting the South Node

at 28 Taurus). And yes of course - this conjunction existed for everyone.

So why would it affect me more than some? That, we would say, is

because AS the nodes rolled over my 8th house cusp of personal/emotional

connection into the 7th house of relationships and my 28 Taurus

house of self worth into my 1st house of 'sense of person hood'...that this

was NOT the Nodes doing their thing in isolation - they were both tagged

with other objects (in this case Juno and Black Moon Lilith).

This thus become a perfect (if ouchy) example of what is meant by

the astrological rule which tells us that the more transits hit at once, the

stronger the cumulative effect.

And yes, I got the telephonic headache to prove this rule correct!

...and the Moon was conjunct Jupiter in Gemini and Vesta. Juno/North Node is the need for self-discipline, and let’s just put it plainly: hardly anyone (ANYONE) likes doing the North Node thing.

 My personal natal Jupiter is at 16 Gemini. So this Moon-

Jupiter-Vesta confab IN COMBINATION WITH Juno-North

Node at the cusp of my natal 8th house is what spelled

a personal shaking of my mental apple tree. (I think he took

a couple of my apples, but that's okay. What are friends for?)

More to the astrological point, this demonstrates amply how

the Moon - by sign and aspect (transiting and natal) can tell you

what a situation is going to be 'about.' I was searching for information

(a Gemini quality) and the whole event was verbal - very Gemini.

The Moon is well known to be a day-to-day timer, which

is why it's a good thing to keep track of through the month!

As for Jupiter, remember my saying that the big trick with Jupiter in Gemini is not to over-speak or to assume you know the whole story? While I could certainly glibly say that the verbal volleys which hit the cross-country phone lines between myself and my friend (sometimes it’s a good thing when you live 2,100 miles away from someone)…the detail here is that this argument erupted because I kept asking him how he knew something because I couldn’t understand how he had reached his conclusion.

He took that to be an insult and challenge. Or something like that.

And thus began the debate.

I submit that ours was a classic Jupiter in Gemini argument. The good news here is that the commitment (the Vesta promise) to be friends (which requires communicating) got us at least as far as sorting the first layer through settled out inside of a few days. Via email…I’ll take it.

In listening to the horrible happenings in the Middle East and Africa, and in then hearing of my friend’s very not-lovely week with FedEx, I am reminded that ‘communication’ takes a lot of forms. FedEx ‘communicates’ things from one place to another. And the violence in the Middle East was sparked by a video put up on YouTube. Yes, there’s a lot of discussion about whether people were looking for an opportunity to rebel and riot. Yes, there’s definitely a problem when you’re talking about countries where communication and media is anywhere between tacitly and totally controlled understanding what happens in a free society where nothing gets censored, as ill-advised as it may be. It’s to be understood that there are many people living in societies where you can’t just post what you want on some social network and those people are listening to Hillary Clinton say ‘we had NOTHING to do with it’ and thinking that’s a lie simply because it couldn’t happen that way in their country.

Bottom line, the form, the format of the incendiary spark – it’s been the same thing. People rioting in the street, destroying property and killing people over their values being ‘decried’ by others as they (right or wrong) violate those people’s values…it’s all terribly Lilith-Nodal Axis-Juno.

Okay…except for the volcano. But sometimes nature gives us the natural emulation of what we’re going through.

Sometimes…when sometimes goes wrong in our personal life – and then we hear of something going wrong in the world – it really does pay to stop and think. I didn’t roll my software back to look at this until today. 

But I did realize early in the week that the violence in the Middle East and Africa was in format much like the argument I had with my friend.

That’s what got me to thinking. And it was because I recognized the similarities between the YouTube video and the ensuing eruption of violence and the argument I’d been through – because I understood that there was a misunderstanding coupled to a lack of facts which in both cases set off the explosion…

…that helped me. Suffice it to say I was the one who initiated the email ‘sorting out’ of the situation. And no, he hasn’t called me, but in time he’ll call, he’ll groan at my horrible puns again and we’ll move on from there.

In one sense the Guatemalan eruption was highly demonstrative. It showed us that sometimes things have to erupt and that providing you know what to do (the government told people to evacuate and they evacuated) things don’t have to turn ugly.

That’s another quality to be associated with Jupiter in Gemini. Jupiter in Gemini is – at it’s best - the search, the thirst for knowledge. This combination embraces the Gemini issue of ‘choice’ and the Jupiter quality of expansion in a decision (a mental choice) to recognize you can never know everything.

If life is a journey, every day brings us new things to learn.

Here’s to at least keeping our mind open enough to consider them before we erupt!

Volcan Fuego fuming between eruptions

(photo credit Luisfi, November 2009)

 
.