2011 Cosmic Weather Report: Cat at the Crossroads

Clashing pasts and futures prompt us to unearth the bright gifts of history from the heavy weight of its shadow. At the Crossroads of All That Has Been and All That's Yet To Come, past and futures are bombarding the world like crazy to catalyze the hidden soul force of human beings. We cross the crossroads when the secret strength of our inner nature proves the skeptics wrong, transcends the ravages of history, and rises to claim the high ground of a life that means something, a love that counts.

Amidst this bombardment of futures, grab one and make it your own. If it seems blurry and uncertain just go by how it feels rather than how it looks. After a while instead of it being your own private future others may get it on it and it may turn out to be more substantial than you thought.

Amidst the flak of the past, just witness the old stories and beliefs as they rise before your mind's eye and pass away. Like a cat at a crossroads, there's a strong clear path through the chaos that you find by following your intuition and refusing to second-guess yourself. When pasts and futures clash like this it takes special foresight to weave between them.

From the outset Jupiter dominates this year's weather, fomenting a purging action in the depths of the species. This is the kind of shake-up that can free that secret longing in your heart that has laser beam power to shine through the crumbling debris of a the past, and illuminate something bright and luminous up ahead.

In early January, Jupiter conjuncts Uranus setting the keynote of the year. Jupiter holds the blueprint for human evolution. Uranus takes the most advanced part of a person and advances it. The conjunction is in Pisces, which, like a vast sea of species memory, carries layer upon layer, cross-currents and riptides of all we've had to weather to get to the present moment. Don't be put off by the deluge, though--to secure a new future everything in the way of freedom has to come up and come up and come up before we can clear it.

It takes subtle senses to gaze through the murk and realize Jupiter and Uranus are double-teaming the self-sabotaging quality of human beings in order to free us. You get free by releasing all excuses that keep you from being the love you are. You get free by realizing you already are.

Have you tried getting somewhere good via three steps forward and two steps back? Have you sworn to do things differently yet lapsed into the same old rut? Did you make a vow you forgot to keep that needs to be restored?

With two such transformative planets cheerleading humanity's ability to get out of its own way and open, this forward/backward pattern gets much more of a forward slant to it, especially in the very beginning of the year when all fifteen planets are direct.

On January 19 our three week release from having no planets retrograde comes to an end. Hold nothing back during this special Three-Week-Direct launch of the New Year, for this gush of forward motion will not be repeated for a long time.

February 3 begins the Year of the Cat*. Amidst self-sabotage and foward/backward motion, change nonetheless is upon us swiftly and sneakily as a cat. In this regard 2011 recalls 1963, an earlier Year of the Cat, the year the sixties really became the sixties. It was hard, in 1960, 61, 62, with so much of the fifties still going around, so much convention and normalcy, to believe anything crucial was ever going to change, or that love was all you need.

But in the upper Uranian levels of ultra-awareness we rise beyond all specters of the past into a free region our planet is now entering, an alpine region of consciousness where it's much harder to hide from ourselves.

Cats are quick to sense the way things are going; low to the ground or climbing high and flying, they are martial artists of following their intention with unflinching resolve. They combine ultra-fine-tuned awareness with swift action in response to subtle signals that others are slow to perceive, but cats are undeniably in on.

During this Year of the Cat*, tune into what you see and sense and sniff and perceive on levels beyond ordinary awareness. Don't let your doubting mind contradict the telepathic awareness of your whiskers. If you sense the unmistakable scent of Change coming, let a feline awareness lead you through the subtle signals between here and there, until you join with others heading the same direction, and it finally becomes obvious that we're all part of a Movement to overthrow normalcy and replace it with miracle and wonder.

In March comes the opposition of Jupiter and Saturn, known as the Great Opposition, which occurs every twenty years. Jupiter carries the blueprint of the future while Saturn holds patterns of the past. Both have equal rights--for until we learn the lessons of the past we can't create something new to replace it with, and innovation reverts to the same old paradigm in a brand new wrapper.

In an earlier Year of the Cat, 1987, a Harmonic Convergence in August swept us into new global awareness. In August of 1963, another Year of the Cat, a Baptist minister from Montgomery, Alabama led a march on Washington where he delivered a dream that summoned a new future for two clashing races. Some laughed, some sent death threats, some clung to the insanity of old ways long after they were proven bankrupt. Others listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. on radios in the crackling silence of bus depots, and nodded; millions of nods going out from 300,000 souls gathered in the shadow of the Washington Monument all over the world. My prediction is that this summer another wide scale event is likely to draw collective attention to the need for change in a way that will ring through the years.

The clarion cry in 2011 is the same as in 1963: As long as one of us is chained none of us are free.

Even when we drop our shackles, though, even if you dump that low-life relationship, quit your job, move to a new location, you have to drop your invisible inner shackles to really be free. You can cut chains with a hacksaw but you need special tools to cut away the part of the past that binds you to scarcity and lack. Inner shackles are why billionaires die hungry and few of us realize the good we've got until it's gone.

Give it a try. In this Year of the Cat, set your sights on something out in front of you that's yours. Hone in on it with the unblinking focus of a ravenous feline, and let that leap carry you to the living future that stretches out where your heart and mind converge just the other side of the crossroads. Try living this way this year and let me know with the subtle telepathic signals of a cat, how it works. If you end up dying once or twice don't worry about those two lives-you've still got seven more left.

* Some oriental systems of astrology use both the Rabbit and the Cat. I prefer the Cat.