America’s Pluto Return and Healing of its Karma

Most years Presidents Day comes and goes, and I don’t give it much thought other than gratitude for a 3-day weekend to catch up on taxes or other projects.

This year, though, the cosmos is inspiring those of us who follow astrology to reflect on the karma of the founding fathers.  This week, for the first time since the founding of our nation, Pluto returns to its exact location in the sky as on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed.  It will also ping this point in space a few times this year.  

When you look at the symbolic nature of this, Pluto is the god of the underworld, the place where we experience a dark night, heal our karma, and in turn are reborn.

On the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, these men turned around and continued living out of alignment with the very truths they had declared.  They continued to enslave Africans, slaughter Native Americans, and destroy a land that didn’t belong to them, creating a whole lot of dark karma.  

The lead up of Pluto pinging 27 degrees Capricorn this week started back in 2008 when it first entered Capricorn and the economy collapsed.  What has happened since then?

10 years ago Trayvon Martin was slaughtered and his killer got away with it, giving birth to the Black Lives Matter movement calling out racism and racial inequality.

We’ve also had the Me Too movement calling out misogyny.

We’ve made gay marriage legal through the Marriage Equality Act.

We’ve had the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, calling out the oppression of Native American communities.

Then there was the election of Trump who is the ultimate embodiment of America’s dark side, bringing to light that we still have a long way to go to heal the karma of this country.

And over the past two years the pandemic continued to amplify this karma, dividing us instead of uniting us.  

We are at a pivotal point.  Do we take the momentum of the good that’s come out of these past 14 years and continue working to make this karma whole?

Or do we double down on the patterns that destroy our democracy and end up losing the very freedoms the original presidents claimed they stood for?

It’s time to make our country whole.

At this very moment, there are school systems refusing to teach about slavery, the holocaust, and the massacre of the Native Americans.  How can we evolve if we don’t understand the past?

The systems at play want us to be divided.  Political parties, the tech industry, communication and media, religions, economics, dark conspiracy theories created to distract us from the truth are all in play to trick us into taking sides and in turn shaming the other side until they are deemed unworthy.

When we consciously choose to unplug from these systems, we remember that we’re all created equal in the eyes of the divine, god/goddess, source, however you relate to the greater whole.  

This country was founded on the premise that anyone escaping oppression could come here to carve out a life of liberty.  We’ve come far, but there is still quite a ways to go for us to reach the point where we can say that we do indeed live according to these values. 

It’s time to create equality through healing our land and waters, through meeting the basic needs of every human being, through remembering that we are all equal.

(Photo by José de Azpiazu on Unsplash)

Remembering Love in All the Right Places

 

There is a growing number of loved ones in my life who have passed away and as time goes on, there’s been a beautiful shift in how I relate to their love.  The first big loss was my maternal grandmother.  She passed away on Valentine’s Day 13 years ago.  I was in London visiting my brother at the time and I believe it was her way of always reminding us how much she loved us.

Each of my closest loved ones who have passed on have a way of connecting with me from the other side.  The number 919 shows up when my grandmother is reaching out to me.  Her birthday was 9/19.  With my paternal grandmother, blue jays show up on my fire escape or follow me around in the park.  She loved watching the birds hanging out at the feeder in her backyard.  These are reminders that I am still loved even if I can’t be with them here on the earth plane.

When my stepmother, Linda, passed away last spring, she came to me in a dream and said, “Ladybugs will be our thing.  Anytime you see one, remember that I am with you.”  I thought to myself that’s nice, but I rarely run into ladybugs.  There was that time over a decade ago when one rode the subway on my shoulder and got off at Columbus Circle, but that’s about it.  The next day I saw a big bright ladybug on the label to a wine bottle and said to myself, “Very funny Linda.”  Then a few weeks later, as I was walking in the park, a butterfly flew into my face and as I turned my head, there was a ladybug sitting in the middle of a flower.  I would have missed it if the butterfly hadn’t slammed into me.  Last fall, my dad was visiting, and we were sitting on a bench near the river when a ladybug decided to join the conversation. 

Most recently, I was watching the television show This is Us (small spoiler alert ahead if you’re not caught up) and the mother, Rebecca, is recalling a day when the kids were having a tantrum in the car and a ladybug flew in through the window, immediately transforming the tantrums into sheer delight.  Here’s the kicker. . . The kids named her Linda the Ladybug. 

Linda suffered from Alzheimer’s the last 16 years of her life.  In the final years she was unable to communicate yet being alone with her in the silence was never difficult.  I could still feel the love and joy that was in her heart.  She might have lost her memories and forgotten her words, but she still remembered love and I could still experience that with her.

Love is such a powerful force and yet can make us feel so vulnerable.  It serves up so much joy, pleasure, and passion and is also an elixir to help us heal when we are suffering.  In Reiki we work with a mudra called Gassho.  In other practices it’s known as prayer or namaste position.  When we work with this mudra and breathe into the heart, we begin to restore balance and harmony within our being.  As that harmony is restored, we can more easily remember with gratitude both the tangible and intangible expressions of love. 

Love is not only found in our personal relationships that make it easy to be loving, but also in the people who trigger our anger and fear.  When we can remember this, we can begin to shift how we respond to our most challenging relationships.  Love is accessible to every dimension of life, and it can be called upon to transform any given experience into something beautiful.

This week I was reflecting on the “recipe” for restoring the fullest experience of love in our lives and the words grace, compassion and joy came to mind.

Grace reminds you that you are loved, and you are enough no matter who you are and what you’ve accomplished.  It helps you to cultivate self-love and anchors a sense of safety within you so you can have the courage to explore your inner realm.  Think of how the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz discovered he always had courage in his heart and grace bestows this on us when we journey back to love.

Compassion creates space for you to embrace both the light and the dark.  It reminds you that everything is of the divine.  It brings fluidity to how you perceive yourself and others with kindness.  Within the word Compassion there is “Passion” which inspires you to stay the course as you seek to experience more love in your life.

Joy is the presence that exists within all dimensions of life.  It is found in the cracks of even the darkest of places as well as in your happiest moments.  It creates a nonresistant space within you to welcome the fullest expression of love into your life.  When joy is fully flowing within you, you can’t resist love.

Love is everywhere, even when we’re grieving or in a state of fear and worry.  

The mind prefers we stay in the old patterns of “looking for love in all the wrong places”. 

The heart encourages us to instead remember love in all the right places!