This too shall pass

Pluto Return of the United States of America

It’s funny how it’s hard to find the words to write when something is so close to your heart.

I keep expecting the emotional energy to effortlessly emerge in perfect prose, but instead it seems to be silently sinking into my stomach. It does so with an uncomfortable swirling shiver, as though I have somehow swallowed a shadow. I know it needs to come out, and I also know it isn’t going to be pretty.

This is how I feel when I turn my eyes to my home country. I have always loved America - it is the part of the world I know best, and it is the part of the world that knows me best. Looking out across the Atlantic, I have so many questions about what America is, what America was, what America will be. None of them have easy answers, and many are so raw, unsettling and painful that I am almost afraid to ask.

And yet I know that now is the time to ask these questions because the United States - and everything that it represents in the world - is in deep water. The American Dream that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone”* is so clearly littered with corruption, division, and discrimination that it almost seems laughable. We can feel the foundation of the country rotting beneath our feet, the sickly smell of decay snaking its way towards our nostrils.

I also know that now is the time to ask these questions because I see it in the heavens above. 2022 marks 246 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it takes this amount of time for Pluto to make one full trip around the Sun. This means that Pluto is now in the same place it was when the country was founded, a phenomenon we refer to as a “Pluto return” in astrology. Planetary returns are a big deal, and as Pluto comes home, it raises powerful questions about how America will choose to embrace its essence.

Modern astrologers often describe the essence of Pluto as one of transformation. I don’t disagree with this, although I want to be clear: if transformation is moving from one form of life into another, Pluto represents the death of the old. It is a necessary trip to the underworld, an unveiling of the ghouls and ghosts we have buried below. Pluto is the sweaty sock at the bottom of the bag, the spot you can never wash out, the still-beating heart in the coffin.

For America, a Pluto return means confronting its uglies. Extreme poverty, systemic racism, mass shootings, rape culture, climate change, disinformation, nepotism, political violence, nuclear war - these and more are ripe for review. It feels horrible to write words like this, and it feels horrible to breathe an air already so thick with these terrible themes.

So please let me also assure you that it doesn’t have to stay this way. If we dare to come together and reflect, to look at how these things have come to pass, to understand how our shared beliefs have created the world we see before us, we can choose to live another way. Even distant, icy Pluto has a heart, a beautiful reminder that love always wins.

Pluto will pass over the exact point of return three times this year as it creeps forwards and backwards across the sky. This week brings us the first; the second and third will arrive in July and December, respectively. Because Pluto moves so slowly, however, the events and circumstances of its homecoming are by no means limited to these months. This is something we have felt building for the past several years, and it may well be something we feel winding down for the next several.

So however you see America, however you see the world, this year I invite you to consider what you believe. I encourage you to let go of anything that limits your ability to be beautiful, true, loving and free. It is your birth right to live like this, and you are the only person who can stand in your way.

Love,

Patrick

*The American Dream was first described in these terms by James Truslow Adams in 1931.