Swamped
by L. Gabelsberg, written October 8, 2014
Can I overcome Texas?
What correction is this?
The mists, the veil that keeps me here,
bound in a swampy stew.
I have been through with you
for a long time.
Why does some part of my soul
sing in martyrdom every time I come back?
Even with last night’s pesticide in my throat
the train still runs all night,
Screeching and squealing through my head.
The dragon is me, but no fire here.
Only swamp.
It’s not easy sleeping with ear muffs.
Mosquito larvae breed in my throat.
The obstacles to peace are many.
The solutions are few:
A good meal, a good night’s sleep, a song,
the smile of a friend, the laughter of a child.
When I moved back to Texas after four nourishing years living in the desert in Tucson, my Dad had passed away in April of that year, four days after my birthday. I cried on my way to work every day for most of the following school year, barely able to force a smile. It was a difficult year. We lived a stone throw from the railroad tracks in a crummy tract neighborhood I couldn’t wait to move out of. I truly had to wear ear muffs to get any sleep. My children were all unhappy to have left their friends in Arizona to come back to the humid, traffic-ridden city, which they no longer considered home. On my way to my teaching job each morning there would be incredible mists and fog covering the fields that surrounded our neighborhood. Cutting through that autumn fog every day was a challenge, literally and figuratively. While still deeply in grief, I composed the above poem. I thought it interesting that Saturn moved through Scorpio when this was composed and I thought about this poem today in pondering Scorpio and the themes of Pluto as we currently move through a Venus Retrograde in Scorpio until mid-November.
On January 27, 2008, Pluto moved into the sign of Capricorn and remains there until 2024, asking for the collective, generational transformation of institutions, authority, responsibility, and power.
Pluto and Saturn will be coming into a significant conjunction in 2020 while in the sign of Capricorn, which Richard Tarnas writes about, the Saturn-Pluto alignments.
Pluto currently sits at 18 degrees of Capricorn and is still barely more than halfway through the sign. Saturn joins Pluto in the sign of Capricorn, currently at 4 degrees, though being a faster planet, it will catch up to and conjunct Pluto at 22 Capricorn on January 12, 2020. By the end of the year in December of 2020, Saturn will move into Aquarius and get all the way to 13 degrees in the months following and turn retrograde.
With these two planets coming into conjunction in 2020, in what ways might society place more limits on those in power, and/or transform our institutions? When will those in power meet the “restriction” of Saturnian influence?
According to Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, Saturn-Pluto alignments are associated with,
especially challenging historical periods marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction: eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects.[30]
[*quote from from Becca Tarnas’ blog]
Is the current Venus Retrograde in Scorpio/Libra as well as Jupiter in Scorpio, asking us to wade into the swamp and drag out all that is murky and in need of drying out and to prepare for the intensity of this Saturn/Pluto conjunction, Jan 12, 2020? I believe it could be.
The very first children born with these Pluto placements in Capricorn are just now ten years old, and all of the children born after Jan 2008 share this Pluto placement, and so we could call these youngsters, the “Pluto in Capricorn” generation. The children born with Pluto in Capricorn will be age 12 or so when this major Pluto/Saturn conjunction occurs in 2020 and will also experience their first Jupiter returns in this same time period of intense conflict and crisis, during very formative years of their lives, then it will again conjunct 30 years hence, when these children reach the age of 42. I read online from teachers around the country who report or complain that their classes with children of these ages are “different, “difficult,” and “the worse they’ve seen” in many years in terms of behavior, that they seem entitled. I don’t know whether there is any truth to that, but I find it interesting to note. Don’t we need some changes in our institutions? Would these young people be the generation to truly bring this about, or at least to experience that transformation most intensely and closely?
(more to follow…while adding in Neptune in Pisces in 2011)
Eagle Eye Astrology 