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. . .