2010 January : ncgrsandiego.org

Jan

13

January 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Our usual New Moon correspondent, Johnny Mirehiel, is experiencing Mercury Retrograde technical difficulties and will not be able to provide his usual splendid analysis this month. We expect (and hope!) that his column will return for the February 13 New Moon. For Thursday’s New Moon/Solar Eclipse in Capricorn (11:11 pm PST, 25.01 Capricorn), we offer this reprint of an essay from April Elliott Kent’s website, BigSkyAstrology.com. UPDATE Jan. 15 – This just in! You can read Johnny’s New Moon column here!

Eclipses in Capricorn:
The Buck Stops Here
by April Elliott Kent

I took a short vacation over the holidays that included a near-total news blackout. My only source of information was through my friends’ Facebook postings, which is how I learned about the failed pants-bombing attempt on Christmas Day. When I tuned into NPR a full ten days later, this was still the top headline and comprised the majority of the news coverage. Between rolling my eyes (get back to me when you’ve got something new to report on the situation, media!) and dialing to the local jazz station, I overheard President Obama’s invocation of Harry S. Truman’s famous declaration of presidential responsibility: “The buck stops here!”, itself a riff on the concept of passing the buck (passing blame onto others).

Because I’m an astrologer born just one day after Obama, I’m intimately familiar with his chart and know at any
given time exactly what planetary activity he’s up against. And because I’m an astrologer who is especially interested in eclipses, my ears pricked up at that particular quotation – because in it, I heard the upcoming Solar Eclipse in
Capricorn (January 15, 2010) preparing to fall precisely on Obama’s natal Saturn.

In my Moonshadow Eclipse Report, I describe eclipses in aspect to natal Saturn, in part, like this:

The buck stops here! This cycle often leaves you feeling pushed up against a very solid wall, blocked and frustrated at every turn, and feeling victimized. With eclipses in aspect to natal Saturn, the key is to determine where your responsibility truly lies in a given situation, and then accept it – but don’t accept a scintilla more or less of the praise or blame than you deserve.

Saturn describes the universal rule that says you create your own reality. If you refuse to accept your responsibility for authoring your current situation, someone else will likely come along and make you do it, blaming you for a lot of stuff that really isn’t your fault; nothing gets you clearer about what really is your responsibility!

That bit about responsibility sticks in some people’s craws. But I don’t mean to suggest that the awful things that happen to you are a function of your nasty karma or your failure to think positively enough. Rather, I consider Saturn’s message empowering, not punitive. The very word “responsible” implies that you are able to respond. Nowhere in that word will you find the concept of “blame.” Responsibility is not about assigning blame, either to yourself or others; rather, it’s about finding the most useful way to frame a given situation, and to accurately assess the ways in which you are able to respond to its challenges and opportunities. Read more