I sit here wondering whether we’re headed into a controlled collapse (this seems to be Trump’s preference) or an even more massive, intrusive, and controlling federal government — or both. The big question for now: Is the second necessary in order to achieve the first? And if both, which comes first?

Because the other obvious alternative is, of course, collapse, chaos, pure and simple, and prolonged, and with it, civil war. To be avoided.

Of course my preference is the fourth, lesser known alternative: regeneration, likely following a controlled collapse, and I will add, through permaculture practiced everywhere, horizontally networked, rural, suburban and urban, cooperatively, by individuals, families, neighbors, small connected groups, all linked locally and exchanging energy with small, locally owned businesses, and all of us learning from and growing with Nature herself.

All these future alternatives loom as powerful reverberations from mid-January’s once-every-35 year Saturn/Pluto conjunction, this one in Saturn’s ruling sign Capricorn, ratchet through the interstices of human civilization.

The last time we had a run on the stock market and near-collapse of the fiat money system was in early 2008, just as Pluto had entered Capricorn. Pluto doesn’t leave Capricorn for Aquarius until 2025. Still plenty of time for Pluto to further demolish and/or radically reorganize long-standing, top-down, hierarchical Capricornian structures.

Meanwhile, Saturn enters radical, innovative, group-minded, airy Aquarius on March 23, for a test run through late June 2020. Let us welcome three months of experimentation with new Saturnine forms for the Plutonian life force to flow through. I’ll get back to that, but first:

Bottom Line: What this virus psy-op scare has done is force humanity to disgorge all the F.E.A.R. (False Evidence Appearing Real) that has been building/seething/germinating/rotting in the collective unconscious since the birth of this nation in 1776!

It’s purgation time, folks, and hopefully we will at some point be able to look back and recognize this astonishing trauma, when whatever we took for granted suddenly blinks out — as our prolonged collective healing process, during which we as a species released enough pent-up fear to let go and allow in LOVE, the only other real emotion.

(Anger, remember, is but denied, projected fear.)

Fear contracts, controls. Love expands, allows. Fear perceives scarcity, distrustful. Love knows abundance, trusts in the benevolence of the universe. The choice between fear and love is truly ours, each of us individually, and it must be made moment by moment, with every breath. When enough of us are intentionally and consciously letting go of fear to allow in love, the frequency field of Love, which both fills and fuels the universe, can build, stabilize, flourish, pump its naturally healing energy throughout our sad, addled, restless, medicated, exhausted society.

How the U.S. especially works with the Saturn/Pluto conjunction is key. Because ours is the world’s largest economy, and our current president, Donald J. Trump, is the one other national leaders look to to provide the model for destroying long-planned globalism and returning to nationalism, where every country “makes itself great again.”

(That would be a good start. And let’s go further: decentralize down to first, our sovereign selves, and then to our sovereign localities, horizontally networked into sovereign bioregions, circling the world through our small permaculture farms.)

Over the next five years Pluto is returning to its natal place, at 27° Capricorn in the U.S. chart, for the very first time, after 248 years. The first return of any planet to its natal place in the lifetime of, in this case, a nation, is a period of time when that planet’s meaning finally becomes evident. And what is the meaning of Pluto? Pluto equals Power. The primal power of the life force which can be used creatively ((as “power from within”) abused (as “power over another”) and/or refused (cf. the toxic internal energy build-up of those who feel victimized rather than celebrate their sovereign selves.)

Pluto can be used to control through force or to encourage and empower. Which shall it be? Clearly, our nation has been on a war-mongering rampage since its inception, however disguised as “good” and “heroic” — and our military industrial complex dominates our own economy while plundering, occupying and enslaving much of the rest of the world. The U.S. has historically acted like a testosterone-driven teenager; other nations, especially those older and wiser than ours, know that you don’t use Pluto that way without its power blowing back at you. In short, during this first Pluto return the U.S. government will either learn from its past, clean out the corruption and dismantle much of its fattened bureaucracy or, likely, die off, in order for this land and its peoples to begin again.

But meanwhile, we can be glad that, thanks to Pluto, the nasty fear-based gunk that has been stored in the collective unconscious has finally surfaced. And, as I mentioned in another post, we can be glad that the very successful media operation to spread fear and panic has finally united the entire world! Too bad it took fear of a virus to do it. Not even “climate change” was enough to galvanize the public into changing behavior. Heck, end of the world in ten years? No worries! Party on! But make that fear one directed towards our own bodies, and does so now, right now, in the present moment, when so many bodies have been either ignored or turned into machines at the gym; right now, when so many bodies have been stuffed  with junk food, fast food, processed food, sugary and alcoholic drinks and legal (pharmaceutical) and other drugs (not to mention chem trailed air, fluoridated water, denatured or chemicalized soil used for growing GMO “food”)) for decades, well then, no wonder the Fear builds, takes over the mind.

Scene at one grocery store yesterday: besides no toilet paper, all the frozen pizzas gone. All the meat, gone. Canned goods, gone. But the produce section? Especially the organic produce section? No problem, fully stocked.

Meanwhile, we in Green Acres Village are preparing for planting as usual, carefully placing seeds in soil blocks and glad there are “no more than ten people” grouped to live here in these three houses. I wonder: will they enforce a “lock-down” to the extent that we aren’t even supposed to venture outside? Not even into our own yards? If so, how can we plant our seedlings?

Every person on this planet where the “corona virus” has infected the collective mind has been affected in some way. For me, it’s economic concerns: Our Air B&B is currently down, given that IU is down as well as all restaurants and bars and cultural events and most of our paying guests come here because of our proximity to the university and all that it offers. And it’s concern about whether enough rents will come in next month to pay all the expenses, given that some podmates in the gig economy have been thrown out of work. For housemate Dan, it’s realizing he can’t get his car back from the high school class where they were going to fix it, since they suddenly and unexpectedly closed down for the entire semester! For Charisse, it’s switching from delivering people where they want to go to delivering take-out for them. For Andreas, one of the lucky ones who is on contract for his work, it’s trying very hard not to worry about the scary virus. On and on.

I do notice that those of us who, as elders, have lived through other extremely strong events (like JFK assasination and 911) are more likely to be able to weather this latest unfolding Plutonian collective trauma that appears to be easily unraveling whatever fragile cultural/political/economic structures remained.

Today, notice that Mars is within two degrees of Jupiter, making everything that happens bigger, more sweeping. Jupiter itself is now at 22°, only two degrees from Pluto. So the three planets are in a tight four-degree conjunction. Boom!

Meanwhile, Capricorn Moon creeps up to cross the stellium, moving at a rate of one degree every two hours, TODAY and TONIGHT..

In his presser today and yesterday, Trump assumed that this virus scare will begin to fade in two weeks, IF we all cooperate in keeping our social distance and staying home. Astrologically, it looks like his timing is about right. And it looks like this virus scare scam is actually uniting Americans, and not just through F.E.A.R.: we are all changing our behavior for at least these two weeks, no matter how polarized our silly external “identities” or internal “perspectives.” Bingo!

What’s next? Well, let’s just fast-forward to December 21, when Jupiter finally enters Aquarius and Saturn follows, close behind, to meet up at 0° Aquarius on December 21, Winter Solstice, 2020! Can you believe the timing? Astonishing.

And fascinating, to note that this date will also be the three year delta for Trump’s first EO, the one that threw down the gauntlet on the horrific hidden corruption of human trafficking that has been secretly poisoning society.

And that, folks, that time when Saturn and Jupiter meet up with each other in their own Great Conjunction (every 20 years) now in Aquarius, is when the experimentation with brand new and more equitable ways of doing everything, of learning how to cooperate as equals, will really begin, and grow, and later be joined by Pluto in 2025 to deepen and penetrate into the newly fertilized soil of a regenerated humanity.

This all assumes, however, that the current apocalyptic thinking has subsided enough to be able to think creatively again. Something us old peace warrior apocalyptic thinkers have been doing for many years: we’ve known that the world could not continue to grow technologically and economically by consume infinite resources on a finite planet. Knowing the “collapse” was coming, we’ve been creating little lotus pads, like our little Green Acres Village; our little experiments in “community from the ground up” have been sprouting from the detritus of the old spoiled civilization; we are now the wayshowers for what will become a larger movement, to live in a loving, more cooperative manner that acknowledges and integrates the shadow wherever it is found, rather than burying it so that it surfaces again and again as F.E.A.R. — of our own inner lives, of our own bodies, of each other, of the Earth.

P.S. Check out Martin Geddes latest newsletter. Sent to my inbox today. Love it.

On Pandemics, Panics, and Propaganda