Playing Musical Friends

7.7.03


If you've ever been part of a group of friends, you know the combination of personalities creates a dynamic that constantly changes, based upon who is present at any given moment and what everyone's moods are like.

Perhaps there is one among you who is the goofball, who brings out everybody else's silly side when you all are together—and when she is absent, a certain seriousness permeates the remaining crew, which is sometimes much-desired and sometimes a bit dreary. Maybe your group has a flirtatious one, a smart one, one who asks the difficult questions, one who always make everyone feel better, one who makes a killer lasagna.

Then, within the group, each individual pairing or subset takes on its own character. Suddenly, when the goofball is alone with the one who asks difficult questions, she reveals a part of her psyche ruled by sadness or unresolved grief, the comedienne in her having developed as a defense mechanism. On a different day, however, she is able to turn the tables on the question-asker, putting him on the hot seat and revealing the deep envy he's always had of her and her unrivalled ability to enjoy life. Meanwhile, the flirtatious one and the smart one write collaborative poetry when no one else is around; it is a secret delight the others in the group know nothing about.

For certain chunks of time, Smarty and Flirty might spend more of their away-from-the-group moments together, just the two of them. Each might be going through periods of hyperactivity or introspection, moods that compliment each other's or provide a creative tension, and so they are drawn to one another. During other times, Smarty might spend more time with Killer Lasagna Queen because their energies match, while Flirty might engage in a lurid affair with the Nurturer, teaching him to take care of himself instead of everyone else for the first time. We see these natural shifts even among TV's most famous Friends. Sometimes Rachel hangs out more with Monica, other times with Phoebe. Sometimes she wants Ross, sometimes Joey.

This group-of-friends metaphor was what came to mind when I thought about the big shift currently underway in the relationships between the outer planets. In astrology, we can roughly split the bodies in our solar system into two groupings, the personal planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars) and the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). The personal planets move more quickly and are thus likely to be in more variable positions in each of our birthcharts. They symbolize the most basic parts of our individual personalities as oriented to our personal survival in the world. The outer planets are the slower-movers who spend longer durations of time in particular signs. As such, they help us recognize our individual relationships to the larger whole, society, the collective unconscious and such. And their combined placements cast a certain astrological flavor over a given period of time.

All this to say, we are about to get a new flavor. The friends' moods are changing. Certain friends have spent a lot of recent time with other friends, and now they're moving on to different things. Since the end of last summer, three major outer-planet aspects have essentially ruled our lives, astrologically speaking. If you read this site regularly, they will all sound familiar, as I've written at great length about each of them.

(1) Saturn trine Uranus: The more traditional, stodgy but practically-minded friend holding hands with the crazy, eccentric, no-respect-for-status-quo reformer friend, each making sure the other doesn't go too far in either respecting tradition or destroying it.

(2) Jupiter oppose Neptune: The larger-than-life, adventurous-and-expressive but also sometimes indulgent-and-"too-much" friend trying to balance his big personality with that of the sensitive, faithful, romantic, deluded-or-visionary?, crazy-or-genius? friend.

(3) Jupiter trine Pluto: All the while, that same larger-than-life guy discovering how much more intense he was than he ever thought, thanks to a transformative boost from his magical, behind-the-scenes, power-player friend who added extra oomph to everything he did. Within the past month or so, all three of these aspects reached their third and final peaks of extremity and are now beginning to taper away in impact.

If these three big aspects sound like they were a lot going on at the same time, you are absolutely correct. And to add fuel to the flame (pun intended), all five of the outer planets were in air and fire signs since last summer, until Uranus moved into Pisces this past March. To give perspective on this, air and fire are considered the active (or masculine, though such gendered terms inevitably pose problems!) elements in astrology, while water and earth are considered the passive (or feminine) ones.

Though I don't have the space to go into detail on the qualities of the elements here, suffice it to say that having all five outer planets in the active signs has certainly contributed to a feeling of "full steam ahead" over the past several months. Activity and action, mental and physical, have kept our lives in dynamic flux. Many of us (myself included) may have felt, from time to time, exhausted and in disbelief that stuff just kept happening and moving and changing and never calming down.

Well, now they are finally starting to calm down—though please note my use of the phrase "starting to calm down" as opposed to "calming down". With the ongoing Mars-Uranus conjunction still in effect, we have certainly not settled. But, with Saturn moving into Cancer last month and then Jupiter to enter Virgo, the outer-planet balance will be tipped three-to-two, water/earth-to-air/fire (Uranus's brief retrograde back into Aquarius notwithstanding, to be technical).

In addition, the outer planets will be in far less high-powered aspect to one another than they've been in recent months. These factors combine to produce a more relatively quiet, introspective, stabilizing, emotionally satisfying astrological climate over the coming months. Most likely, late-August-and-into-September will provide the last little boost of Uranus-powered dizzying activity before we can finally disembark from the jet-propelled spacecraft and walk a few steps on solid ground.

Sunday's Full Moon in Capricorn is a good energetic introduction to a more mellow upcoming time period (and again, please pay close attention to my language—it's just an "introduction"). This is not the most dramatic or powerful lunation, though its chart is ripe with quincunxes, a "minor" (astrology nerds, forgive me!) aspect of 150 degrees requiring subtle adjustments between planets in signs that speak different languages. (For example, on this Full Moon, Venus in Cancer makes a quincunx to Neptune in Aquarius, Mercury in Leo to Mars/Uranus in Pisces, etc.)

To me, these quincunxes symbolize our slow transition out of high-activity/low-contemplation mode and into something more self-nurturing, practically-minded, emotionally rich and quietly wisdom-manifesting. In other words, now that the whirlwind has moved our houses from Kansas to Oz, we can at last step outdoors and begin to get acclimated to these new magical surroundings.

Just when we think the universe is never going to stop messing with us, it finally gives us a break. It's during these lulls that we are best able to nest, process, incorporate, and begin gathering provisions for the next storm. And though we love our group of friends, both as a group and as individual pairings of friends, sometimes it's best to hang out alone for a while—to gain some perspective and to recharge ourselves, so that, when social times blaze up again, we have more to give and more self-consciousness with which to give it.