Uranus (in Gemini) Return: Day Three, of Four Day Documentation, glimmers of integration . . .

May 23, 2026

Note: see last three posts.

This morning I spent another few hours going back through old journals and writings to help me remember the four years of the final 90° turning point — 2001 through 2005 — in my 84-year Uranus Return cycle.

Those years began with a sudden jolt: the final issue, #46,  of the quarterly, Crone Chronicles (founded in July 1989)

Now what?

What would I do after what was likely to have been the most impactful “project” of my lifetime?

Oh no. Back up. More likely, the most significant “project” is my living legacy, grandchildren. Both of them born for the rapidly accelerating future.

Drew, now 23, as a coder in the DC area, who works at an intensely high level with AI.

And especially, for me, Kiera, nearly 26, born in the summer of 2000. So, when CC died, in 2001, she would have been not even a year old, and already crawling, climbing over everything; very fiery, intensely fiery (Sun early Leo, conjunct Mars in late Cancer, all trine Moon in Aries), and would break out in utter fury whenever her extraordinary will was corralled in any way.

That fiery child has now evolved into an intensely creative and independent being, whose fire is directed to work successfully on many levels, where she lives in Boulder, Colorado. Completely at ease with the fiendish complexity that contemporary life demands, son Colin told me today that his niece has just applied for a position at Apple. . .

Fiery Kiera was me. That too intense fire burned through to the third generation. But with a big difference. When I was a kid, I was much more “shut down,” functioning as a good obedient girl, until my own wake up call, which began in earnest when I left home and went to college and married and had a child — all during the first, intense, four-year 90° turning of the Uranus cycle. The first Uranus square. No fun. Growing up in the ’40s and ’50s, I was trained not to express Uranian individuality. Given how I hemmed my fiery self in, of course I felt totally shut down. Saturn dominant. Uranus curdling inside.

Little Kiera, luckily, had me as her Grannie Annie, who would instruct her parents how to work with their fearless, fiery child so that they did NOT shut her down. Instead, whenever she exploded, just gently lead her by the hand to her room, where she was welcome to scream as much and as long, as she needed to. And then, when she calmed down, she was welcome to re-enter family life.

In other words, don’t stop the fire; that will lead to horrors, as my own life attested.

As a double Sagittarian (Mars also in that sign, exactly opposed to Uranus in Gemini), fire is my middle name, and outbursts, had they been allowed when I was young. . .

Not only that, but given that I have Moon in Taurus, the dichotomy between the fiery expressive self and persona and the earthy, security-seeking, slow-moving emotional self couldn’t have been more difficult to integrate.

Which reminds me. Back in 1996, I wrote this essay

Marriage between Sun and Moon

and it describes very clearly, the difficulty I faced, both internally and with male partners, during the extended period in which I finally learned how to integrate those two divergent facets of my own individuality and personality: seven very full and at times agonizing years of “processing” (via journals, dreams, and co-counseling with close female friends). Yes.

Personal Processing

my inner child, whom, during those years, I named “Orphan Annie.”

 

Wow: I just read through

Marriage between Sun and Moon

again. And so glad I did!  I needed to read through it to remember that I forgot that I finally let go of my horrific addiction to cigarettes — begun during the first turning of Uranus (see post from two days ago) — during the second turning of Uranus! (see yesterday’s post). And, that this personal victory over a powerful addiction that had me gobsmacked was probably the most important of my lifetime, freeing me from slavery, fueling everything since then!

My husband of 12 years (one Jupiter cycle) Jeff Joel died on January 4, 2003, during that third Uranus turning . . . My book, This Vast Being (contact me if you’d like a copy), chronicled my deeply personal response to his passing.

Looking through a journal from 2004, during the third Uranus turning, when I was already deeply into the extended process of healing — from his death, but especially from my own extended death-in-life, I found this little riff today, besides which I had scrawled: “my first poem.” It directly addresses what I was facing for so long, projected into cigarettes, and at times, men! The terrible Cartesian split between mind and body.

 

Mind hesitates, turns back

Body barrels on —

Which to follow?

 

Mind turns and turns again

Calibrating

According to various

strict criteria

squeezing itself

spiralling to a point

Not Knowing

Ever Judging

This?

Or that?

 

Meanwhile, body sure

as a stallion plunges

against the leash

a terrible grinning

sure-footed

nose to the ground.

 

That third turning of Uranus (2001-2005) occurred during the years Uranus was in Pisces. No wonder the voice I received during that time, asking me to “Cultivate Gentleness.”

And actually, just ask my 60-year-old paralyzed, nerve damaged son Colin Cudmore: it does seem I managed to do that. Too bad I wasn’t there for him, when he was small. Luckily for me, I’m there for him now. As he has always been there, for me.

Oh, and one more note: After Jeff died, of course, given my craving, given the hole in my being, given the tendency to project my animus — I tried to get together with a man again. Whereas Jeff had laughed at me whenever I tried to control him, just left the room laughing (which infuriated me further), this final man, another controller himself, tried to put me in my place for one year, and of course, failed. But so did I fail myself, by further postponing the necessary, and fiendishly difficult integration of authentic individuality (no matter how “divided” the self), that the cycle of Uranus demands.

 

No wonder most people don’t live this long!

P.S. I notice that this third post is more flowing, less ratchety (is that a word?) than either of the first two, and especially the first one; might that reflect a growing ability to work with the Uranian energy over time, much time, an extremely long time, nearly 84 years?

I wonder, I do wonder, what comes next. What is out there beyond this 84 year cycle, this bubble that I’m finally popping in 2026?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

URANUS (in Gemini) RETURN: Day 2 of four-day documentation. Geez!

May 22, 2026

Note: This is part of a series. Not sure how long it will be. See Uranus Return posts from last two days. This time I look at the second time Uranus rounded a 90° corner on its first ever, and last — unless I live to be 168; P.S. is this a joke?) 84-year cycle.

Whew! So glad I began this documentation process! I gleaned new and very significant understanding from just the first 90° Uranus and Uranus/Saturn turning, and now, from the second 90° turning, between the ages of 38 and 42, (Uranus opposite Uranus) I punctuate that first understanding by recognizing it as the first indication of a powerful, self-sabotaging personal pattern.

 

Okay, to begin.

This early morning, having trouble centering memory back to investigate what happened, both to me and through me, during the years needed, I went to my cabinet and pulled out some old notes, where, I thought I remembered, and it turns out, I did!— I had already documented some crucial Uranus transits!

Plus, going back through these old notes refreshed the aura that I have always felt myself living within, that of Neptune, at the natal Midheaven no less see my chart, and look again? transit Neptune, with its 165 year cycle, now sits directly opposite itself at the IC.

Yes. Neptune in Aries: I’m rooted into a new beginning, but confused, visioning, delusional? — and so on. But: I’d say that at last, despite other social experiments in decades past, each time creating or co-creating a Neptunian “paradise” that lasted only a year or two, this one, Green Acres Permaculture Village, does seem to have sunk in its roots deep into Mother Earth. (Hard to say when GAPV started. Rather, it gradually emerged . . . through a series of tiny, idealistic (i.e., impractical) decisions, beginning in 2009.)

And guess what further!

Here’s the natal chart for the USA that I pulled up from those same notes. Made back when I was living in a yurt in Jackson Hole (sometime in the 1990s) Notice that its MC sits in the identical degree as my own natal Neptune, close to my own MC, which means transit Neptune also has been conjuncting the IC, the root point, of the U.S.A. 

Yep. The U.S. Neptune in Aries: beginning again, but confused, visioning, delusional? — and so on.

Need I say more regarding the current larger, political, cultural drama?

 

Okay, back to me.

I’ve always been highly aware — or, I should say, ever since I began to actually absorb the symbolic language of astrology, as a way to help me make sense of why I was fired at 30 (Saturn Return), in 1973 — from an experimental college!, “for being too experimental”! — of the fact that what was going on back then was extremely Uranian!

BUT: there weren’t any significant Uranus transits to my chart then. On the other hand, there was a once-in-a-lifetime extended transit of transformational, death/rebirth PLUTO over both natal Neptune and Midheaven, during those years, which included both succeeding in getting my PhD (despite dissertation that called the entire history of western philosophy into question), and being hired (over 560 other applicants) by this same California college that fired me (the college itself lost its accreditation after several more decades). So my doubly Sagittarian self was very definitely, full-of-it back then. I could do anything and get away with it. Right? Pluto, in Leo!

Wrong.

My Saturn Return would initiate an entirely other 30 year-cycle. I had to learn to pay attention to my own fiery Sagittarian ego, and not let it get out of hand.

 

But what’s interesting here, and would be for anyone studying astrology, is that, in my natal chart, Pluto in Leo has harmonious aspects (60° and 120°) to natal Neptune/MC, Saturn, and Mars/Uranus! Huh?

Pluto also has problematic aspects as well, 150° inconjuncts with both Mercury and Venus, both in Capricorn.

So the point is, whatever powerful Pluto does both natally and by transit, resonates with everything else Pluto is connected to. (And yes: even its harmonious aspects require transformation.)

The larger point is: the natal chart, just like our very selves, works as a synergistic, integrated whole. I’m attempting to isolate certain aspects and transits, but they all inevitably bleed into one another. In order to “make sense” of such a living example (my own) of how the ignition of one person’s (my) life at a certain time and place (documented in the birth chart), I focus on certain experiences, yes, and how to correlate what is or was “happening” with the abstractions produced by this mysterious, radiating symbolic language.

Not easy to do. And even more difficult to convey, much less explain to another.

But notice: I am deeply immersed in this process. And it IS changing me. I can feel it.

 

Here’s the takeaway from today’s focus on the second Uranus 90° transit: Uranus opposite Uranus, between the ages of 38 and 42:

It began just after I had begun an experimental (Uranus) local magazine with the very Neptunian name: OpenSpace.

. 

That was in November, 1978. I has been with this magazine for about a year before I began to get restless . . .yep, Uranus rearing its volatile head, demanding change. Okay. I turned it over to others, and decided I would go to Findhorn, a very experimental (and long-lasting) intentional community in Scotland — and present a workshop on starting a community magazine there!

Yes. Big, Neptunian dreams, for this double Sagittarian who, of course, always wanted to travel to distant lands and never had. . . (I did manage to travel extensively, to even Siberia!, but not for another few decades).

Yep, you guessed it. Something interrupted my big Neptunian dream . . .

 

Sigh. Here goes . . .

1980. 20th reunion of my high school class of 1960.

There, I ended up getting together with our class version of “bad boy” Jimmy Dean.

Phil had gone into the military, as a “Black Beret,” before Vietnam, where, he told me, he was a long-distance assassin (he was a crack shot). But whether he was telling the truth or not, the main thing is, he had been traumatized, and I discovered over the next few weeks, had a bleeding ulcer that, over and over again, threatened to take his life. Hospital emergency rooms with loss of most of his blood. That would be what punctuated our one year together.

Perfect match! I could get together with him, heal his body, change his mind, heal his soul!

Oh yeah?

Here we go again. The “I can do anything” meme.

(Geez! Shades of 60-year old son Colin Cudmore’s horrific, long-term predicament, and my daily devotion to his possible healing! See my near-daily posts on Caring Bridge.)

Thank you Phil (who died several years later), for your service — and your service also to me; bringing me, my ego, up short, once again.

And meanwhile, wrecking (Mars/Uranus/Saturn) my big Neptunian dream (Findhorn).

 

I did not include in yesterday’s post that what had precipitated the ultimately wrong-headed journey I went on with the Uranian inventor, a choice I made, when presented with two men who both wanted my hand (the other being my old high school boyfriend). This choice, presenting itself as a polarity, was actually something that I could have addressed differently, by actually facing and embracing the open space between the two poles — the two men — that space being an unknown future, willingly taken by my 19-year-old self.

I remember the occasion well; though I’d rather I didn’t. . .

There I was, sitting at the kitchen table I shared with roommates, alone, and thinking, that this was the only real, that is, authentic, choice: to say no to both men, and to stretch out on my own. But that choice would take courage, which I did not have. And I knew it. So, instead, feeling utterly cynical about my own cowardice, I flipped a coin. Yes, I flipped a coin. And Patrick, the inventor, won. Thus did I hijack my own freedom to be myself, as well as marry a man in bad faith.

So here too, with the second Uranian square (Uranus opposite Uranus): This time I could envision (Neptune) an alternative future; it was not just a blank space, like it was when I was so young. This time it was Findhorn! Scotland! I would take off into the wild blue yonder, bearing a project (OpenSpace magazine) I had already shown worked! But then the dark figure, Phil, suddenly loomed large.

I got together with Phil, hijacked myself (Mars/Uranus/Saturn) from going to paradise.

In both cases, in Jungian terms, an animus projection onto a man, one experimental, inventive, but selfish as hell (Patrick), the other brilliant and iconoclastic, but dark, and decidedly troubled (Phil). Both aspects of myself that I was unwilling to face. Or, I should say, it never even occurred to me, either in my early 20s or as I was turning 40, to face them.

That’s why some of us live long. So that we can actually manage to learn how to turn around, at some point, and not only investigate, but ultimately consciously notice and process how we have created the life path we’ve been on, and how our own fantastically complex nature, for me, at least, as symbolized by astrology, “makes sense” of that life, so that I may begin to glean its deepening, widening, labyrinthian MEANING — while still alive, embodied! Rather than as the purported “life review” afterwards. . .