It will not be easy to describe the astrological influences affecting our affairs this week, there is so much going on.  I’m going to be a little bit more abbreviated than usual since I’m behind in a lot of things.

Relationships

This week Venus and Mars are moving very close to each other and finally making a conjunction on Friday the 20^th; which portends significant relationship developments.  Love can be an exciting pursuit, but once the object of the devotions is finally “captured” it’s not quite as exhilarating anymore and it may end soon.  It seems we don’t purse actually a person, but a dream conveniently superimposed over a person.  Once we find them, they are not a dream anymore but “reality”, and how exciting/stimulating/engaging is that?

So quickly we move on, chasing the dream, but leaving a trail of disgruntled “exes”.

Dealing with Delays

But at the same time Jupiter will be at exact opposition to Saturn on Monday, August 16^th; which can cause a long delayed effect to our projects, temporarily frustrating our aspirations and ambitions but hopefully prodding us to make them permanently real in our lives.  So, relationships as referenced above may have an undertone of delayed fulfillment or unresolved angst at work on them, but ideally pushing us to really work hard at achieving our real desires in relationships.

Mercury Retrograde

Mercury will also be turning retrograde on Friday, August 20^th.  I don’t anticipate much from this three week period, except on the 20^th itself; discussions, intellectual subjects, and communications in general may experience a “bump” in their normal course of affairs.  Like I always say, actual problems in communications and business matters are more apt to manifest directly under hard aspects of Mercury to malefic planets such as Mars, Saturn, and Neptune; as opposed to the effects of retrograde Mercury.

However Mercury does rule two houses in everyone’s chart, and those life areas represented by those houses in your chart will experience at some level that little “bump” I mentioned above.  For instance in my chart Mercury rules my eighth and eleventh houses, and I could anticipate some psychological turbulence, metaphysical stirrings, minor financial good luck, and developments with my circle of friends and associates.

Increased Intensity

THEN we also have the square of Saturn to Pluto on Sunday, August 21^st. Saturn is a first class malefic  and it connects stridently to the energy of another malefic and that should be interesting to say the least.  If Saturn represents areas of pathology and our worst fears, and Pluto much the same; it would be easy to anticipate some deeply entrenched and therefore disturbing energies brought up from our individual and collective subconscious this weekend.  These kinds of energies don’t just pop out on their own like a jack in the box, they are as much elicited by appropriate turns of events in our lives in a real-world context.

It’s sort of the chicken or the egg paradox: what causes the disturbance in our lives, the outer event, or the internal complex it activates within our psyches that magnetizes the event?  The answer of course is both.  So people may be feeling weird, which in turn causes weird things to happen in their lives (a variation on the so-called law of attraction); but also weird things happen in our lives which cause weirdness to grow and fester in our minds

Saturn during this time also makes a biquintile to Neptune, which will reinforce the issue of “weirdness” but also of the fears that emanate out of loss of control, loss of normal mental orientation, and the loss of faith.

World Situations

We’ve just gone through a lot over the past few weeks and months, the “stuff” is continuing in strange ways this week; it affects our minds, attitudes, and perceptions more than anything now.  Sure Obama has a plan, BP says they’ve “fixed” the leak in the Gulf, and those contestants on America’s Got Talent are really amazing; but we also have in the backs of our minds images forming in our minds of the future with millions of people with unemployment benefits running out, needed social services dwindling or disappearing, millions of homes going into foreclosure, the decimation of the economy of the southeaster US with the BP oil spill situation, the ramification of a war starting with Iran on the price of gasoline and worldwide lash back of the Muslim world.

Images like these poke holes in our sense of happiness and security like nothing else, it’s almost as if a part of our cherished reality is melting down into a pool of molten chaos and there is no concept of “the other side” that we’ll come out of because the situations are so big and deep.

Rule Your Mind, Rule Your World

Don’t start jumping out of windows yet, because things never usually turn out as bad as we fear them to.  The melting down is going on with the “bad guys” to; trying to rule the world is just as much a delusion as is the belief that you have no control over the world.  People talk about revolution, the revolution will be in the minds of the people.  Revolution also means the down fall of tyrants, and tyrants only rule by a perception of the mind.  Guns and soldiers mean nothing compared to the acquiescence of the people, or their rejection by non-acceptance.  Rule your mind, rule your world.

Curtis Burns
curtisburns555@gmail.com