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?