This week-end’s Virgo Moon brings us to our inner temple. Time to reflect on an extraordinary week. Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods, is having a high-octane conversation with Uranus the Liberator.  Be ready.  Insight and revelation are headed your way.

With yesterday’s  Leo New Moon, we’ve turned a corner.  We’re entering a new phase of the life in the cosmic transformation zone that has become our reality.

We’re at the halfway point of a six-month stretch of maximum transformational heat.   Since late May — when Venus set off on her vision quest — Uranus and Pluto have been within two degrees of an exact, volatile square.  They’ll remain that way until  mid-November. We’re all cooking.

On September 19, these two mighty cosmic change agents will have the second of the seven collisions that will crack our reality open by March of 2015. Even after that, things won’t settle down much.  It will be years before these two are out of each others’ sight. These are the energies that brought us the Great Depression, the American Civil War, the Protestant Revolution.  Get ready, because we’re no longer in Kansas.  It’s receding in the distance as you read these words.

Venus, one of the primary carriers of the Cosmic Feminine, has been central to the profound shifts underway in our values. This week,  Venus and the Moon ignited the Uranus-Pluto transformation zone when they moved into the center of the conflict.  Tthe archetypal masculine energies of Mars and Saturn joined as got in on the action too, turning up the heat. An old world continued to die before our eyes, and a new one to emerge.

Below is a sampling of the headlines that turned up in our shared reality this week. They reveal the stark confrontations with old-paradigm power that are occuring around us daily.  They also illustrate the wondrous revelations we’re getting at every turn, about the mystery and power of life.  What about your own life?  What were the headlines of power and revelation there?

Transformational Times: Headlines from Planet Earth

* Pussy Riot (thanks, Venus, for making the message so clear!) found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison by a Russian judge.

•  Connecticut nuclear power plant shuts down a reactor because of something that no one dreamed of in the 1960s, when it was built:   Long Island Sound’s water was too warm to cool it.

• NASA unveils a record-breaking galaxy cluster.

* Julian Assange is granted asylum by the Ecuadorean government, though he can’t get out of the UK.

• Shooting at Texas A&M University.

• Earth/Sky reports on astonishing findings about bow-head whales. These magnificent and critically endangered Arctic creature sing constantly, with an entire catalog of songs in their repertoire.  Bow-head whales, who can live to be 200 years old, have two voices, a high one and a low one, that make music simultaneously.

* Conditions in Syria worsen.  UN investigators report on its government’s  crimes against humanity — less than a year and a half after Vogue magazine’s glowing profile of “The Rose in the Desert,” the First Lady who played a key role in giving a  sophisticated, progressive face to a regime of murder and torture.

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