Wall Street, Washington and the Astrology of Change

There are lots of places you can get play-by-play astrological analysis on the Wall Street bailout ballyhoo, and I encourage you to check them out: The brand-spanking-new site AstroDispatch is an excellent place to start. But here, I want to pull back and look wider — not at the specific events or the twirling of particular planets, but at the process itself. Because really: What in the hell is going on?

A little brief background in how astrology sees the world: Basically, there are three types of energy — active, stable and changing. (The technical terms are cardinal, fixed and mutable.) At first glance, you’d think the goings-on in Washington were active energy — I mean, there is a lot of stuff swirling. It doesn’t get much more active than this, right?

Right — kind of.

But this morning we got news that last night’s summit of government leaders broke down into one of the wildest meetings Washington has ever seen. There were proposals and counter-proposals flying frantically back and forth, there were charges of politicizing the event with electoral politics, and at one point  Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reportedly got down on one knee to beg the Democrats not to “blow up” his proposal.

Nothing, apparently, got done. And that’s what characterizes active energy: You put effort into a process, and out comes a product.

But there is no product out of Washington today.

That’s because the truly active phase has not yet arrived. It may — we hope — arrive this weekend. But right now our lawmakers are still in the grips of changing energy. See, the cycles of our lives, whether in government, in our private lives, in the turning of seasons, or in the lifetimes of stars, all follow this same basic pattern of energy output:

• Stable. This is where we suckle on the fruits of our labor, where life exists in a certain set way. Your relationship is good, the value of your house more or less rises, Wall Street and Washington work the way they seem always to have worked. On the positive side, it’s a luscious, comfy existence. We don’t have to bother with newness. On the negative side, it’s lazy and/or stubborn — I mean, really, who wants to get up from the couch?
• Changing. Something occurs that gets you up from the couch. It might be slow change; it might come quickly: A partner has a protracted disease or, at the other extreme, dies suddenly in an accident. Housing prices fall slowly but surely, or one surprise day the Dow Jones drops 1,000 points. If we stay on the couch, we risk being stuck in old and ineffective patterns. But when change is on the doorstep, we should not always act right away. We first need brainstorming, information, consultation, analysis, perspective and synthesis of ideas in order to prepare the way for whatever is next. Granted, sometimes this has to occur quickly. But it still must occur.
• Active. Armed with information, and perhaps even wisdom, we can move ahead with confidence — letting go of old patterns for good, working to bring about a new order. We pursue a new love interest, we find a new job, we move, we put reasonable regulations in place to prevent the next Great Depression. If we are effective in this phase, we cycle up to a new plateau of stability, where we can once again suckle on the fruits of our labor — until the next change comes.

I see the bailout debate now in a late changing stage. This is the stage, says the Huber perspective, wherein a person, an entity, a country, pours everything they have into a task. It’s like a climber who finally sees the summit he’s after. No result is yet produced — he’s still climbing, and climbing, and climbing — but the end is in sight. We can see it; we know what we want: Stability. Rest. The gorgeous view from the top. We want to get through the changing phase, the active phase, and settle Wall Street back on its couch to get fat again.

But Washington doesn’t yet seem to know how to reach that end. That’s because we first need brainstorming, information, consultation, analysis, perspective and synthesis of ideas in order to prepare the way for whatever is next. We need to complete the changing phase before we can move on to the active phase.

I have a hard time with people who won’t stop to think, to gather information, to analyze and imagine the unfolding of different scenarios. Oh, I don’t care if the question is, “What movie do you want to see?” or even, “What shall we name the baby?” But when the question is, “How shall we save this country’s economy?” or “How shall we spend $700 billion today?” — then I get a little perturbed. Future stability is put at risk when the changing phase — learning, processing, analyzing — is bowled over in the rush to action. Acting prematurely can send us right back into crisis.

Or, at the risk of sounding schoolmarmish: Haste makes waste.

Look, an old structure has been decaying for several years. An old stable phase has been changing and is now in the final throes of its death. Our leaders are scrambling to manifest its next form — to move from a changing phase to an active phase. The sense of urgency — of needing an anchor in stormy waters — is natural at this point. It could almost be no other way. But it does not have to be managed with panic, fear or — worst of all — divisiveness. It can, with the right leadership, be managed with wisdom and perspective, with vision and unity.

Hey, a girl can dream.

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P.S. I realize that, after using the word “change” in my headline, I should probably have mentioned something about the presidential candidates’ (over?)use of that word. I plan to analyze each of their charts next week, and the subject of change will no doubt come up. So stay tuned. In the meantime, click below to comment — I’d love to know what you think!

Photo credits: Money, Couch potato, Don’t panic