By: Janette Dalgliesh – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
When a planet’s orbit takes it back to the same point in the sky that it was at the moment of your birth, we call that a Return.
For example, the Sun comes back for a Solar Return once every year – that’s where we get the expression ‘many happy returns’ for a birthday.
With its slower orbit, we get a Saturn Return about every 27 years, creating a significant upgrade in our authenticity.
Slow outer planet Pluto does this too – but with an orbit of about 247 years, no human is going to experience their own personal Pluto Return.
But nations do.
If we take the Declaration of Independence as the ‘birth date’ of the USA, various different calculations put the Pluto Return at happening between February 2019 and January 2025. (The reason for the variations are highly technical, but basically the impact will be felt through this period)
So we are in it, right now.
And the simplest way to understand what this means is to imagine a human could have that Pluto Return.
A nation has a collective persona.
She is an entity who emerges after a period of gestation and moves through infancy to the teen years, from young adulthood to the maturity of later years.
When she encounters her Pluto Return, it’s going to be an invitation for significant, deep transformation and evolution – a willingness to go through the murky, difficult and utterly necessary process of death and rebirth.
For the USA, that’s the invitation which has been issued.
Imagine the USA is a woman reaching her Pluto Return.
Imagine she was born out of a desire for individuation, a desire to have an autonomous existence – but that birth was made possible through violence, theft, rape and pillage. And she knows it.
Imagine she was fed, sustained and raised to have strength and independence – but that the feeding, sustaining and raising was only made possible on the backs of people who were enslaved, and deliberately kept powerless through policy or cultural habits.
Imagine her current heady role as a leading power in the world was created by, and still sustained by, those dark systems of oppression based on gender, age, sexuality, race and more. And she knows that her citizens are largely still imprisoned in those multiple systems, as either victims or beneficiaries.
With this Pluto Return, she is finally being asked by mighty Pluto to examine her own relationships with power.
None of it will be easy.
She needs to come to terms with the mismatch between her rhetoric and her reality, the bloody and dark foundations of her own birth and childhood, and the decisions she is choosing to make right now.
We see it played out in conversations about constitutional originalism and the role of scripture in education systems.
Does she want to cling to a past which created such a mixed experience for her people; or does she want to evolve into a new and more equitable version of herself?
It’s not hard to imagine her prostate on the floor, sobbing with shame, guilt, terror, confusion and defiance.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Pluto does not pull us into these difficult shadow zones, simply in order to simply see us suffer.
He does it because it is only by walking through those dark places, by crawling on broken glass through the mud if we have to, that we can emerge to a different and more evolved existence.
Human consciousness evolves in a series of lurches, not a smooth trajectory.
And of course, a nation is not a woman.
She is a collective.
While many people are pulling the collective forward on that difficult journey – learning cultural competency from non-white voices, taking up the cause of restorative justice, seeking a fairer and better version of the USA; many others are clinging desperately to the past.
This happens with humans, all the time. I see it in my work as a coach, and I’ve done it WAY too many times to pretend it’s not real.
Even when we want the result of the transformation, our human brains are terrified of change and we will do anything to avoid that Plutonic journey.
But the journey cannot be avoided.
And this period for the USA has the energies of Saturn and Jupiter bouncing around in the dance as well, all in the sign of Capricorn.
Saturn here says “make sure you build the next phase properly, and have a correct relationship with your own deepest power”.
Jupiter here says “allow for the possibility of optimism and dreams beyond what you can see now – and you better allow this change, or things might get fiery”.
In other words – change is happening.
Expect the unexpected.
Do what you can to point that change in a better direction AND recognise that for many, this process is utterly terrifying.
Whether you live in the USA, or you live elsewhere and simply recognise the importance of this Pluto Return on such a mighty but potentially troublesome ally, the key is to focus on the outcome you want from this period of transformation.
Recognise this won’t be an overnight process. Recognise there might be turbulence.
Let the Jupiter energy raise your levels of hope, because by being devoted to optimism about the outcome, you increase the likelihood of its manifestation.
And as we go through these turbulent times of Mars and Mercury Retrograde, tap into the beauty of the Libra New Moon; and bear in mind that by the end of the year, Saturn and Jupiter will both have left Capricorn.
Their focus will shift from all things to do with authority, governance, rigour and stability, into fresh air oriented Aquarius.
Expect innovation, invention, brand new ideas and concepts we’ve never seen before.
This is the time to hold your nerve.
And VOTE.
Janette Dalgliesh helps successful rebel women create joy-filled relationships with their own careers, busting out of being trapped, bored or miserable. She uses her unique blend of astrology and neuroscience-based coaching to support her international clientele — the poets, the politicians, the artists and the entrepreneurs — so they can do work which makes a difference, makes good money, and makes their hearts sing. Find Janette at her website.
