In the past month or so, and increasingly, I’ve noticed myself becoming very impatient with how material reality slows me down. Just trying to get a key into a lock and turn it, for example. Or picking up my purse, when it’s underneath something else . . . and then having to zip it closed before everything spills out. Or finding my shoes, sitting down, loosening the laces, so that I can put them on. On and on. All these quotidian examples. Everything in my life, and of course in everyone’s life, here in the material world, takes time. From desire, decision, to execution, drawn out unbearably.

I know I must sound crazy, to talk like this. Why am I speaking of something so obvious? Furthermore, so what?

Well, I do think this has to do with a situation that few people ever live long enough to face. Most people die before they are 84 years old, when unpredictable, volatile Uranus returns to the exact degree and minute it occupied at the hour and minute of birth.

I just checked my natal chart with transits this morning. Might it be that Uranus is now, this very day, occupying that exact degree and minute, 1°35 Gemini?

Oops. No. Not yet. Today Uranus is at 1°24 Gemini. Closing in, but not quite there yet.

Last summer Uranus got even closer, but then turned to go backwards on September 6 at 1°27 Gemini.

So this coming moment, which happens on May 24, when Uranus will, for the very first and last time, hit 1°35 Gemini, is a day that I will do some kind of personal ceremony, to mark the closing of a cycle so long that most people never get a chance to reach it.

So I should be grateful. Right? Grateful that I have lived long enough to experience this extraordinary completion of a cycle so long that most people die before its done.

Perhaps my extreme noticing of the Uranus cycle today is connected to the fact that transit Mercury today, sits at 6°53 Gemini, pressing in on natal Saturn at 7°37 Gemini.

(For a five part series contemplating the combination of strict, disciplined Saturn conjunct unpredictable, volatile Uranus in Gemini (a conjunction which occurred for everyone born during 1942-1943), see exopermaculture.com.)

Wow.

Noticing (Mercury) just how hemmed in, slowed down (Saturn) I feel on this day.

Ever since Uranus began its reach for completion, back in July last year, when it finally crossed into 0° Gemini for the first time in my life, I’ve been on the lookout, extreme lookout, for car crashes. That would be a very Uranian event, both sudden and devastating. A part of me wonders if I should drive during this time, but then again, I DO feel protected, and have felt so, for many many years.

I think back to the day when I was walking on a Pacific beach in northern California, having sat on a small cliff where the Russian River met the sea for hours, watching the wheeling wild life below, and suddenly, but very very softly, a feminine voice in my left ear: “I am with you always.”

What?

I sluffed it off and kept walking, paying attention to the tide as it receded to and from the shore. After about ten minutes, came to the place where I had made my way down from the parked car, and was about to ascend, when a rogue wave suddenly rose up and crashed over my body up to my chest.

But the wave did not take me down.

I remained standing. (Thank you chikung and taichi!)

I did not get carried out to sea.

I am with you always. 

Not even the keys in my pants pocket were dislodged.

As I made my way up the path, I noticed a sign that I had not noticed on my way down.

“DANGER: ROGUE WAVES.”

This post feels incomplete. Just as the Uranus return is still incomplete. Once it completes, will everything in my entire life snap into place? Will I experience a magnificent, meaningful AHA!— one that echoes on and on?

And what will that have to do with the sense that I want to be done with this material reality; want to fly off, into space. Am I not to begin a new Uranian cycle again?

If I am to begin a new cycle, then what is it for? Who am I? Why am I still here?