Looking towards 2013: Let us begin the healing of this nation — and our Earth — in our homes, our families, our communities of care.

Update, 1.1.13: Wow, and check out Laura Bruno comment below. She’s already doing what I’m just imagining.

Update, evening, same day: I just realized that 2013 is a numerological “six,” the number of service, nurturance and protection of home, family, and community. Interesting, the synchrony with what popped out of me today with this post.

Let’s use our imaginations, fly into new realities. Realities that all of us, in our heart of hearts have at least touched upon, or glanced at. It’s not too late. It’s actually just the right time.

My son Sean, Sue and the kids are gone, on their way back to Massachusetts, leaving me bereft. I had no idea how much family means to me. — Oh, not true. For I did, I do. But the ties that bind us seem to grow stronger year by year, visit by visit. We’ve been talking (at my instigation) for a few years now about establishing a “family compound” at my house. Sean and Sue come live in the house, and I will put up a yurt in the backyard (yes, I’ll have to get a zoning law changed, first). Son Colin and his girlfriend Greta nearby.

An interesting development in this idea is that some of my siblings and I are also now using that phrase “family compound.”

My brother-in-law John asked me the other day if, rather than Bloomington, I would be open to relocating to a place in the west (where most of my siblings live) that we could all agree on. I would. So now we’re talking about where it would be if we did it, and how we would go about it.

Today, John and I talked again, this time about how we would start. The idea would be to pick a location we could all agree on, and begin, by buying together, a small holding in a neighborhood in a town that we would all like to eventually move to. To re-establish community of place, not just with accidental neighbors, but in a a resurrected extended family, all within walking distance. We are open to kids and grandkids joining us — and others! No blood ties necessary!

What’s important is that we rekindle the bonds that were severed so subtly and blatantly and ruthlessly and unconsciously (take your pick) by structural changes in American society over these past 70 years since the end of World War II when returning G.I.s and their new wives flew the coop, traveled west, went to school and bought homes on the G.I. Bill.

From that time on, what we called “nuclear families” established themselves in sterile little ticky-tacky houses built by developers on grid-lines that expanded and reconfigured into larger and larger lots and homes as materialism ate up our human values and developer-driven suburbs ate more and more farmland and forests, leaving what land was left to consolidate into industrial agricultural behemoths run by corporations whose bottom line is neither the soul nor the soil but money, just plain money, that “social agreement” to use something in place of something else as “legal tender,” that abstraction from real life into an increasingly fiendishly complex kind of virtual life of off/on blips that nobody really understands, but lots of people pretend to. What they call “the bottom line.” Huh?

Rather than enjoying our authentic, living roots, we have conjured up the bottom line. Yuck.

And. as we all know, those “nuclear families,” set up in the shadow of our nation’s shame, Hiroshima, exploded, in the late ’60s when Uranus and Pluto conjoined for the first time since the Civil War. All hell broke loose. The fake placid calm ’50s surface perturbed, and we’ve never, really, been able to return to that halcyon time.

America is a Cancer nation. It has its Sun in Cancer. Not only the Sun, but generous, benevolent Jupiter, loving, caring Venus, and communicative Mercury are all in that sensitive home-loving sign. In other words, the United States of America enjoys/endures a preponderance of planets, four in all, in that tribal, nourishing, caring sign. The values of family, home, children and community are central to the founding idea of this country.

During this season of the year that is devoted to family — from Thanksgiving, through Christmas and New Years — the Cancer roots of this nation have been threatened by the fallout from the Sandy Hook shooting that destroyed the lives of so many small children and ignited the usual firestorm about what really happened and whether or not it was a psyops designed to take away guns from the populace. (I think so.)

In any case, that this horrendous bomb went off in a bucolic, safe, secure little Connecticut town was to me, a symbol of what has gone so wrong, that we would conjure up such violence to children inside community.

And, that so few of us compared the horror of these 20 children dead to the 500,000 children in Iraq destroyed by our military, is also symbolic of how Cancer too often works: by remaining insular, valuing me and mine against the world.

We need to expand (Jupiter) our notion of family, from national family to human family. Truly, we are all one. Truly, none of us is more than, better than, another. All of us, all humans, all nations, all worlds, are of equal, utterly precious, value.

In America’s chart, explosive Uranus and powerful Pluto are now in relationship once again, the original Uranus/Pluto conjunction of the ’60s now cycled to a point where Uranus is 90° from Pluto. The year 2012, of which this is the final day, was the first year of three to be strongly impacted by this Uranus/Pluto “square” that will see the seeds of the ’60s revolution actually take root and flower.

We begin again, as Uranus in impulsive, initiatory Aries (2011-2018) provokes some people to the point of becoming unhinged, shoot others dead, ignite explosions, go berserk!

Primal, death and rebirth planet Pluto is traveling through Capricorn (2008 – 2024), the sign of structure and the status quo, where it gradually and inexorably pulverizes all that we took for granted in order to expose the living roots of society and begin again.

And the U.S. chart now? Both Uranus and Pluto are “working on” all those sensitive Cancer planets. The fallout started in 2008, when the housing bubble burst — Cancerian family homes suddenly violated (Uranus in Aries), turned over to banks (Pluto in Capricorn) — with Venus and Jupiter at 3° and 5°.

Uranus is still at 4° Aries, and will be either exploding or creatively exploring (depending on the level or awareness) for two more years. And now Pluto, at 8°, makes its slow inexorable way towards the Sun at 13° Cancer. Both Uranus and Pluto will be lighting up the Sun’s energy between 2014 and 2016. That’s when we will either make it or break it as a nation. Then there’s a bit of a lull, until Pluto hits the opposition point to Mercury, at 23° Cancer, 2020-2021. That’s when, most likely, we will begin to consciously understand much more fully just what went wrong, how the very structures of our society enacted such horrific damage to our roots in family, home, community. Hopefully also, that will be when we complete the great work of consciously reconfiguring those structures.

Meanwhile, with Pluto now at 8° Capricorn, in between Venus/Jupiter and the Sun, what can we learn from its passage so far? How can we reconnect ourselves, put ourselves back together again?

I imagine the millions of families who gathered during this holiday season, so many of them with internal fractures from long ago crystallized into patterns of behavior that feel wrong, bad, difficult, impossible. How many of us are able to actually, truly, be with each other in love? How many have left the old demons behind? How many have truly forgiven each other for deeds and misdeeds of long ago, done, usually, with utter unconsciousness in a desperate struggle to survive?

Insofar as we can heal these rifts, we will, obviously, be much better off. And those of us who have healed our rifts to the extent that my family has may be dreaming of family compounds like we are. Imagine how powerful and secure we feel when we sense ourselves with so many other people who we’ve known since childhood, and who “have our backs” no matter what? Who care for us unconditionally? Who will help us when it is our time to grow old and infirm, to die? Who share our values, and our memories?

Just imagine, a nation healed and whole. A people who have, during this holy season, received the grace to move through wounds into wonder, to feel the kindness and care that are truly in the hearts of each of us, when we to feel safe enough to open them.

As the New Year dawns, let us recognize that healing of this nation — and of our Earth — begins in our homes, our families, our communities of care. There’s no time like the present. Let’s go.