Welcome to the June 2023 Cosmic Weather Forecast by Curtis Lang with Jane Sherry. This week we celebrate the Strawberry Full Moon and the Festival of Goodwill, last of the three spring spiritual festivals following Easter and Wesak.
Jane on the Crossnore Trail, Winston Salem, NC, photo by Curtis Lang
Jane and I discovered a lovely 2.5 mile long hiking trail in a new park that just opened a few minutes from us right in the middle of the city! The Methodist Church run Crossnore Community for Children has been an orphanage, school and working farm since 1909.
Rolling meadows alternate with forest and you can see occasional cultivated areas from a distance as you walk along the trail, which is located on the 200 acre Crossnore Campus.
Winston Salem Downtown in Sunset Glow, photo by Jane Sherry, June 2021
Millions of dollars from the Piedmont Land Conservancy paid for the conservation easement that will keep this land available to the public, and prevent future development, permanently. The PLC also paid another million for the construction of the trails in our new park.
This is just a small part of the multi-million dollar parks expansion program going on in our small college town. Winston is already home to an astounding 79 city parks, plus the huge Reynolda Gardens park at Wakeforest University. People here want to get out in nature even in the middle of the city. We love that!
June 2023 Cosmic Weather Forecast
This month’s full moon takes place at 13º 18’ Sagittarius on the evening of Saturday, June 3rd at 11:42 PM Eastern time. This is the Strawberry Full Moon, the time in the Northern Hemisphere when indigenous peoples celebrated the short harvest season for spring strawberries.
Sea Under Full Moon, Photo by Guzmán Barquín on Unsplash
The Full Moon in Sagittarius opposes the Sun in Gemini and both Sun and Moon are square Saturn in Pisces, creating a T-Square Tilt-A-Whirl in Mutable Signs.
You can expect to feel pulled in at least two or three directions at once this week, and it might be difficult to keep a tight focus or even just to maintain a grounded and centered state of body, heart and mind.
The uninhibited free flowing Sagittarius Moon conflicts with restrictive, icy Saturn in the watery sign of Pisces.
This week and the week to come, there's a genuine light-hearted but intense Sagittarian desire to soar, to create, to envision and to communicate the joy of that experience to others, but as we go through our daily routines to navigate the everyday necessities of our lives, it's like walking through icy ankle deep Saturnine Slush.
Infrared Photo of Saturn, Hubble Telescope, courtesy of NASA, 1998
The best way forward is slow and steady, keep breathing nice and slow, deep and deeper. And perhaps you'll reach a point where you recover your felt sense of dynamic equilibrium, and your meditative mind freely enters into a state of flow, when the strong energy of the Tilt A Whirl T-Square can act as a foundation for your practice.
At that point, if you can tune into the harmonious, flowing energy of Venus in Cancer in strong trine with Neptune in Pisces, you can find immense pleasure by listening to music or viewing fine art.
This aspect brings out the imaginative, playful, visionary in all of us, so if you are involved in the creative arts, take advantage of the quality of this time by retreating to your studio, and you will be well rewarded.
Venus trine Neptune in water signs also is auspicious for those seeking transpersonal psychological experiences through spiritual and creative practices.
Lightning, Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash
Mercury is conjunct Uranus this Full Moon, if you are a meditator or creative person, you should prepare to receive electrifying Uranian insights originating from somewhere way outside your normal comfort zone, and to experience an outpouring of attractive, creative ideas.
Needless to say, these Full Moon aspects favor all spiritual practices designed to facilitate communication with our ancestors, including the entire lineage of teachers and aspirants in our spiritual communities.
This Sagittarius Full Moon the Cosmic Weather patterns also provide us with an ideal quality of time in which to enter into conversation with our Higher Self, Guardian Angels, and our Guides and Teachers.
Most of all the Cosmos invites us to participate in an exchange of energies with the global community of spiritual aspirants of all faiths and traditions.
The Sabian Symbol for our June Full Strawberry Moon is The Great Pyramid and The Sphinx. "The belief in an Original Tradition based on the perfect knowledge of the archetypical principles and forms which underlie all manifestations of life on this Earth (and by extension in the cosmos) is deeply rooted in man's consciousness," explains Dane Rudhyar, in his commentary on this Moon's Symbol.
Sphinx and Pyramid, Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash
"The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx are witnesses to such a tradition, especially for the Western world. The symbol implies that such an archetypal knowledge remains the foundation upon which men's minds can still build solid and valid formulations, as new evolutionary developments are pending," Rudhyar continues.
This Full Moon is the ideal time to reconnect with our spiritual roots, to recall peak spiritual experiences, to invoke our Guides and Teachers, and to join with millions of other spiritual practitioners around the world in celebrating The Festival of Goodwill, the last of the three Great Global Spring Festivals of Love and Light, following Easter and Wesak.
If you'd like to participate with us, please see our blogpost entitled Celebrating the Festival of Goodwill, which explores the Esoteric significance of this spiritual festival and provides a couple of different ways that you can participate during the 3 days prior to the Full Moon Festival of Goodwill, on that evening, and during the 3 days afterward.
Capricorn, the sign of big business and big government, is ruled by Saturn, and is associated with the Saturnine potential for mental depression.
Pluto of course represents the mysterious realm of the collective unconscious, and the heroic journey into that Plutonic underworld and back has been recounted in cultures around the world for thousands of years.
So as Pluto entered Capricorn, many astrologers expected large institutions critical to our global civilization to be impacted by this transit, perhaps transformed completely.
Pluto by Franz von Struck, 1909
Looking back on the last fifteen years with Pluto in Capricorn, there's been a lot for humanity's collective consciousness to process, and there's been a lot of depression and rebellion as well.
Capricorn being prone to depression and Pluto representing the collective unconscious, the last fifteen years have been characterized by collective depression triggered by challenges to collective social structures such as the global financial system, the global economy, the transnational political institutions that uphold the current geostrategic balance of power, polarized and conflicted political systems within individual nation states, and the global health care system.
Climate change has accelerated steadily since 2008, and there have been a long series of extreme weather events across the globe. Scientists warn that on current trends, there could be hundreds of millions of climate change refugees by 2050. By that time, much of Spain will be a desert, and the climate transformations around the world will challenge our global civilization's long term ability to sustain our current social relations and lifestyles.
Hades abducting Persephone, fresco in the small royal tomb at Vergina, Macedonia, Greece.
As the Pluto in Capricorn era climaxed in the last three years, America also went through its first ever Pluto return, an event astrologers have long associated with revolution and restructuring of existing political systems.
Polls show that Americans are increasingly disenchanted with their government and suspicious of their neighbors. Many Americans are convinced that people who disagree with their political views are morally or intellectually inferior. Polarization is undermining people's belief in democracy itself.
In short, human beings in general, and Americans in particular, are being confronted with the manifestation of their deepest fears concerning their social, political and economic systems. That's par for the course during a heroic adventure into the Plutonic underworld.
People are scared, depressed, trigger happy and itching for a fight. Just what you'd expect during a long nightmare journey through the shadow side of the collective consciousness, where all of humanity's repressed negative emotions incarnate as our own ghosts, devils and demons we must confront and overcome to successfully navigate labyrinthine journey from the depths of Hades back into the light.
It's been a Long Planetary Emergency ever since Pluto entered the sign of the goat, who after all, is associated with the Great God Pan, and whose name echoes in the epidemiological term "pandemic". The Global Covid Pandemic merely added yet another layer to the multiple simultaneous global crises unfolding around us over the last decade and a half.
It all began as Pluto entered Capricorn, and the Popping of the Great US Housing Bubble triggered the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09.
Bubble poised on finger, Photo by Enrico Carcasci on Unsplash
That was followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, which triggered fears that the entire Pacific Ocean could be contaminated with radioactive waste.
By 2016, with Donald Trump as President, the United States began to dismantle the post World War II global systems of governance that Trump's predecessors had created to manage a globalized economy and financial system.
The world began to break apart into Eastern and Western blocks of states, squaring off against one another economically, politically and militarily. This created a lot of stress, and began to degrade global supply chains, creating volatility in many commodity markets and in the stocks of companies providing strategically important technologies.
Model of Coronavirus, Covid-19
In 2020, the Covid pandemic swept the planet, dislocating supply chains further, and lockdowns froze economies around the globe. Panic in financial markets prompted huge multi-trillion dollar government programs in the United States and around the world to prop up banks and investment firms, to subsidize failing small and large businesses, and to put money into the pockets of the millions of people thrown out of work.
As of now the world has seen 766,895,075 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,935,889 deaths, as reported to the World Health Organization.
Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, which triggered a much wider confrontation between the US and NATO on one side, and Russia, China, and Iran on the other. Cold War 2.0 officially began.
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Anti-terrorist operation in eastern Ukraine (War Ukraine)
Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Governments around the world announced plans to spend trillions of extra dollars for high-tech conventional and nuclear weapons.
Prices of food and fossil fuels skyrocketed, global supply chains were broken for security reasons, as nations on both sides of the Cold War 2.0 divide raced to replace their offshore suppliers and vendors with new sources located in countries numbered among their military and economic allies.
This process of reconfiguring commodity markets and global supply chains will take years and cost trillions of dollars more.
The costs to the global economy resulting from the weaponizing of the entire global supply chain by both sides locked in Cold War 2.0 has exacerbated the runaway inflation caused by trillions of dollars worth of bank and financial system bailouts that have directed that tsunami of cash into financial assets of one kind or another.
Now the Fed and other central banks are committed to crushing inflation by raising interest rates at a time of vastly increased systemic fragility in both the global financial system and the global economy.
Federal Reserve Chair Powell answers a reporter's question
at the March 3, 2020 press conference.
Federalreserve, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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This increases already sky high economic and military risks around the world, and could lead to long term global stagflation, a condition when economic growth is weak and inflation remains strong.
The good news today, Thursday June 1, is that the House of Representatives voted to raise the US debt ceiling and to reduce spending marginally.
As you recall, astrologers have been concerned that a potentially disruptive square between Jupiter and Pluto around this time could signal a short, sharp blow to financial markets.
There was a lot of concern that Congress would fail to lift the debt ceiling in a timely manner, but it now appears that unless the Senate refuses to go along, America has dodged a bullet.
Now, here in America we are entering into our first Presidential election season since America's Pluto Return, which we've discussed frequently in this newsletter.
Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash
It's depressing to see that the most likely outcome of this race will be a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. Maybe the depression is linked to Capricorn's impending re-entry into Capricorn.
But, recent NBC News Polls showed that 70% of people don't want Biden to run for re-election, and 60% don't want Trump to run again. How can we have a functional democracy when there's no candidate for President that people want to vote for?
So as Pluto retrogrades into Capricorn again, we all have a chance to review the lessons of the last fifteen years, and as Pluto enters Aquarius in 2024 we can begin to create an agenda for the next fifteen years.
Constellation of Aquarius, Johannes Hevelius - Prodromus Astronomia
Volume III "Firmamentum Sobiescianum, sive uranographia"
I for one, am surprised that systems have remained as robust as they evidently are after fifteen years of episodic emergencies challenging every social structure underpinning our Global Hydrocarbon Civilization.
Astrologically, there are not any more blockbuster Zodiac bombs in store for us for the next few years. That could be a sign that emergencies will subside into chronic ailments, or it could just mean that existing systems remain intact and ossify further, becoming more brittle as time goes by and challenges continue to pile up over the decades to come.
As 2024 unfolds, Americans must decide what to do as we face of a breakdown of democracy during a time of accelerating risks: runaway climate change; Cold War 2.0; and a fracturing global dollar based financial system that is more fragile and risky than any time since Pluto first entered Capricorn and The Great Financial Crisis engulfed global markets.
This weekend is the ideal time to ask for help in navigating the high risk 21st Century world we inhabit during one of history's most consequential turning points. Being part of the collective exchange of energies of Goodwill will certainly help to boost our spirits.
Curtis and Jane among the privet, Reynolda Gardens, Wakeforest University , Selfie
Jane and I affirm that this Full Moon you all shall receive the grace and guidance you need to fearlessly engage with the retrograde forces so prevalent in our world today, and to envision the solutions to our society's seemingly intractable problems during this Global Festival of Goodwill!
Though we may seem divided by race, creed, color, class, and political prejudices, still, as children of the one God we are able in our souls to feel brotherhood and world unity....In our hearts we can all learn to be free from hate and selfishness. Let us pray for harmony among the nations, that they march hand in hand through the gate of a fair new civilization.
‘World fellowship’ seems a very simple phrase, but in these two words is the panacea for all the individual, social, and political ills that are threatening the world’s material, mental, moral, and spiritual happiness....World fellowship alone can banish hatred and prevent wars. World fellowship alone can stabilize prosperity for all mankind. Therefore I say to you, bring that fellowship into your hearts by communing with God....As soon as you feel God in your heart, you will contribute to world civilization as no king or politician has ever done before.
Paramahansa Yogananda