On April 4, 2022, a dear feline friend, Emmett, passed away. Emmett was the daughter of Embers, my cat Ashes’ sister, and thus her niece and a close relation, part of our extended family. She was fur baby to my longtime friend, former landlord and cat rescue partner John Mignone, and is survived by her sister Maxine. Emmette passed of complications from failing kidneys due to hyperthyroidism.
Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics for almost a quarter century. A former KGB officer, Putin entered politics after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, an event he describes as the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century. In 1996 he joined Boris Yeltsin’s administration; appointed as prime minister in 1999, he filled the role of acting president when Yeltsin resigned later that year, being elected to the office in 2000. At the time, Russia had a prohibition on an individual serving more than two consecutive terms as president, so after being reelected in 2004, in 2008 Putin swapped jobs with then prime minister Dmitry Medvedev for a term, only to assume the top spot again in the following election, four years later. That would have entitled him to two more terms, but Putin changed the law to allow himself to run for an additional two terms uninterrupted, potentially continuing his occupancy of the presidency indefinitely.
On December 1, 1955, an African American seamstress named Rosa Parks boarded a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and stepped into history. At the time, buses were segregated, with “Whites Only” sections up front that were created by movable signs. If the white section filled up, drivers adjusted the markers and asked already seated black patrons to move further to the back. Parks, who according to custom paid her fee up front, then exited the bus and re-entered through the rear door, had initially sat in the black section, but when the driver expanded the white area and requested she vacate her seat, she refused.
At the age of 25, Elizabeth found herself reigning head of an empire upon which the sun literally never set, comprising some quarter of the globe. The seventy intervening years have seen much change and turmoil, both for Britain and the world at large, but the Queen has been a rock in the stream of time, a stabilizing influence for her people, and an invaluable source of information and experience for her governments over the decades.
In 2022 the United States is undergoing a profound and deeply transformative period in its development, namely the return of Pluto to its natal degree. Pluto’s orbit is roughly 248 years, so this is a cosmic event that no human has ever experienced, but it can occur for longer-lived entities such as nation-states. The historical record for what transpires at these times is mixed at best, and subject also to such interruptions and mutations as major political reorganization. (Is it really valid, for example, to continue using a chart for the Norman Conquest of England for today’s United Kingdom, a different political entity entirely, albeit with a titular head-of-state whose ancestry dates back to those days?) As well, when such charts are used, we may see recurrent themes under successive Pluto Returns for the same country, but not necessarily among all countries.
I chose to profile this story, tragic as it is, because it makes an excellent example of how this process unfolds, both celestially and in my own psyche. As a former resident of Philadelphia, and still within that media market, I regularly watch the morning news on 6 ABC, predominantly for weather forecasts. When I heard about a housefire near my old stomping grounds on January 5th which took 12 lives, 8 of them children, I got that familiar tingle at the nape of the neck that tells me to investigate, astrologically.
