Another month, and another major earthquake. I’m beginning to wonder about all those predictions of earth changes. Everyone’s been asking me about 2012, and I’ve mostly been saying that I can see a lot of social unrest in the next four years, but I don’t know how to evaluate shifts in the earth’s crust, and other natural disasters.

So maybe I will be getting a lot more information about these kinds of events! Yikes!

The Haiti earthquake happened just a few days before the new moon, and this 8.8 quake in Chile happened a few days before the full moon. In the Haitian quake, the planets were bunched up in Capricorn and Aquarius, and for the Chilean quake, the planets were mostly bunched up in Aquarius and Pisces.

And the coming new moon is even more concentrated, with a close grouping of planets in Aquarius. Uranus, one of the planets in this stellium, is the planet of earthquakes, as well as revolution and other sudden changes. So will there be another big one, around March 13, a few days before the new moon? Where will it hit? Paraguay, where this concentration of planets will be right on top of the natal southnodes? Or will it be an ocean floor that buckles, causing the shock waves of tsunamis to strike coastal Africa?

I am a little nervous about the coming new moon myself, since it hits a sensitive spot in my own natal chart. And I will be traveling again. I just came back from Caracas last week, and I’ll be going to D.C. in a few days.

And the new moon occurs on the Ides of March! Whoa! The Ides of March is actually lucky for me, since it’s the day I first met the love of my life, the woman with whom I’ve spent the last twenty-three years. But it wasn’t so lucky for Caesar, and that leads me to look at Barack Obama’s chart.

And it’s true that things do not look mellow for President Obama. Neptune is right on top of his natal south nodes at this new moon, and the Aquarius stellium opposes his Mars within about 3 degrees. He’s a pragmatic idealistic, and these constant roadblocks in health care reform must be quite frustrating.

Why do the Republicans feel so safe in their obstructionist tactics? Well, did we really think the right wing would breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Hey, it’s not so bad after all. Barack seems to be a reasonable guy.”? No, they are having their day in the underground, to fume and fret and stalk around predicting how soon we will all end up in Hell. Barack Obama makes an easy villain for them, drawing both racism and anti-intellectualism in one convenient package. The Republicans in Congress are just reflecting the messages of their most anxious and vocal constituents.

The root of all this obstruction is fear, and fear is a natural human response at times of change. On some level, we all know that major change is coming. Whether we’re New Agers reading about the end of the Mayan calendar, or movie-goers going to see the latest disaster flick, we have this sense that we will be living through an important global shift in the next four years.

I think we will all need to face our fears, one way or another, during this time. In the US, there’s a love/hate relationship with revolution. There are always segments of the population that are ready to take up their guns and defend themselves against some vaguely defined enemy. And there are plenty of others who just want to pursue their addictions in peace.

Whether we glorify or fear social change, it’s coming. There are plenty of injustices that are still built into the very bricks of our social system. Is the answer to dismantle it, to destroy those bricks, to begin again? I am a true conservative in that I like to think there are answers that don’t involve pain and violence. Most systems are abstract constructions. Do we have to pay for them in blood? And yet it’s worked out that way, over and over, throughout human history.

Last week, I was in Caracas, where the social imbalances are still stark. Some people still support the president, while others see him as one who has betrayed their ideals. Meanwhile, the streets are stalked by fear, and the wolves come out at twilight. Every week, I hear of another friend or relative who has been assaulted in Caracas, and while I was there, I spent a lot of time looking behind me. v Next week, I will be in the US, and I won’t spend much time on the streets. I will be in a car, like most other Americans, insulated by a metal jacket as I go from place to place. This may give me the idea that I’m inhabiting a small private universe. I will have to remind myself that it isn’t so.

There are some parts of the globe that are more fragile, more vulnerable to the movements of the earth. And there are some parts of the globe that are more polarized socially, where anger and fear play stop-and-go with each other. But it’s still one world. Wherever I go on this planet, I’m just one of a multitude. We are all passing through a portal, but we create the new world as we enter it. It’s up to us.

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