The earth and we are going up in smoke
Thoughts on what pot smoking and wild fires might have in common
vol. 5 issue 10
Greetings,
This weekend I attended a musical “roots” festival. It wasn’t the bluegrass band I’d gone to see that held my attention, however, but the number of people setting fire to other kinds of grass, and then inhaling the smoke.
Setting aside my personal aversion to marijuana, and notwithstanding my former life as a clinical psychiatry journal editor familiar with the convincing body of literature linking the unregulated 74% and higher levels of the psychoactive component THC in today’s cannabis (i.e., this is not your Boomer 1970’s era pot with THC levels of about 4%) to psychosis and various clinical designations of brain fog, I observed this mass weed event with a curiosity that led me to a novel, at least to me, insight.
If you’re a futurist, an economist, a policy wonk, or a climate scientist, you are at least familiar with the notion of end-stage Capitalism and its corrosive impact on life on earth. Whether or not you believe humans are the cause of the damage is beside the point; you will have spent time considering what is coming next, because the status quo surely is ending and it’s your job to help allocate resources for whatever takes shape beyond it.
If you’re an astrologer, such as myself, who tracks world events, you will have spent time considering that the relationship between humanity and the elements is shifting, something that has been predicted for eons as the Great Mutation, and that certain events seem to signal that the end of the old is near.
As Australian astrologer and columnist, Cassandra Tyndall, my guest on this week’s episode of the docu-mental podcast, a coproduction with News from the Ensouled Universe, and I discuss, the Great Mutation is a time when certain planetary patterns signal that one of the four elements — air, earth, fire, or water — will swap places with its predecessor to become the primary focus of all earthly experience.
We have met and passed that moment; it occurred on December 21, 2020. That is when we began to move from a primary focus on earth, to moving into our minds and all things “air” for what we need.
But we don’t get to just drop the mic on earth. There has to be a replenishment.
I thought about this as I observed the scores of people holding flames to their faces and inhaling. In Feng Shui, the Chinese system for maintaining homeostasis suggests that fire is what builds earth. When something is burned to ash, it creates earth. All earth is dead matter, thus ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
What intrigued me most about these weed smokers around me was how deeply they were drawing on the fire. I wondered about this metaphorically. Are we somehow acclimatizing ourselves to the coming fire that unquestionably will consume so much of the planet?
In his startling book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Canadian author John Vaillant describes how today’s wildfires are hotter, faster, and meaner than ever. In telling the tale of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire that left 88,0000 Canadians homeless in one afternoon, Valliant writes convincingly about fire as having its own personality, as though it is hunting and stalking us. If you can’t read the book, I highly recommend this two-part podcast interview with the author.
What Vaillant explains is that because what we have done on earth in such a very short period of time is essentially slather ourselves and our world with petroleum, we have changed how fire interacts with human structures, and ultimately with all the planet.
He explains that virtually all manufactured consumer products anymore rely on some kind of petrochemical, and that includes housing. Petroleum burns fast and hot. So, as soon as fire touches it, guess what? It goes up fast and hot. And it spreads fast and hot. Houses burn faster and utterly to the ground. In Vaillant’s view, there is no escaping the tiger that is modern fire unless we curb our reliance on oil.
Which of course is not a new concept, even if it’s unlikely to happen soon.
If we’ve drawn so much oil from the depths of earth, homeostasis means there is no other way but for the earth to build itself back.
That’s gonna take a lot of fire. I hope we’re ready, able, and not too stoned to meet the fire monster when it comes for us, as it will.
For an astrological hot take on our current unregulated national levels of pot smoking and the dawning of the Big Tobacco settlement, scroll to the end.
Coming soon…
T. SUSAN CHANG
Coming soon to the docu-mental podcast is a disscussion with the astoundingly polymathic T. Susan Chang, whose approach to her many disciplines, which range from policymaking to sewing Tarot-themed comforters, to teaching creative writing, to cooking, and more, is derived in part from her Classics training at Harvard University.
Although Susie’s voice might be familiar to many in this audience as a food commentator and cookbook reviewer at NPR, we’ll primarily be discussing her expertise in archetypal mythology as made practical for every day living through her latest book, The Living Tarot.
My hope is that our discussion will give you ideas for how to reframe our quotidien existence, with all its trials as well as triumphs, as an endless psychodrama where we encounter ourselves by way of encountering the Gods.
ICYMI…
Observations about Smoking while Saturn is in Pisces
The growing prevalence of pot smoking in public is interesting to me from an astrological perspective given that Saturn is in Pisces.
For nonastrologers, Saturn is the god who brings us limits, karma, and death. To say Saturn is in Pisces indicates a paradoxical search for how to create structures in an endless sea of universal acceptance given that Pisces denotes the depth of and breadth of all human experience.
As my cohost Elisabeth Grace and I have discussed on more than one occasion in our podcast, Off The Charts: A Stellar Newscast, Saturn’s ingress into Pisces is generally concurrent with an uptick in public awareness of mental health.
The last time this happened was roughly in 1994. Saturn’s travels through the respective signs of the Zodiac take about 2.5 years each; Saturn’s full synodic cycle takes about 29 years, about once in a generation. It was in May of 1994 that Mississippi’s state attorney general, the first of many, filed suit against Big Tobacco for lying about its harms to the public through deceptive marketing. And thus began a vigorous public health anti-smoking campaign in the US.
The groundbreaking settlement in favor of the citizens of the US occurred in 1998, about 4 years after the first suit was filed. By then, Saturn had moved into Aries, the first sign in the Zodiacal order, and sign that is given to the element of fire.
If my calculations bear up, then I predict in the next two years, public health campaigns designed to curb the deleterious effects of smoking cannabis – and there are indeed many, even if you don’t want to believe that – will emerge, and between 2025 and 2028, some kind of mediation between those who want unfettered highs and those who advocate on behalf of public health will be reached.
What the effects of this might be on the field of edibles and psychedelics will be worth watching, too. Remember, I write from the perspective of someone who believes we are living in an ensouled universe, and by that I mean there is an intelligence and a consciousness that supersedes our own, and that it is not actually “god”, but what it is we still don’t know, and probably never will.
Which is why I believe that the more people there are who use plant wisdom, the faster the dinosaur bones of hierarchy can fall and be cleared from our path. That’s because I’ve observed that people who return from these trippy adventures tend to develop an awareness that empirical structures are all made up. That surely sucks for people who want to control our minds and enslave us 9 to 5.
But as increasingly more of the population starts to become familiar and comfortable with such a fluid reality, they are more flexible about the forms they will create for their own sense of fulfillment. There is less of a lean on stuff, and more on imagination. I anticipate this will mean the earth can catch a break and be more aggressive about her own program of healing, whether or not we humans like it (see thoughts on fire as replenishment above…).
Use the Substack app for easy navigation of all your favorite content
The Substack app aggregates all your Substack interests in one place. And if you have any questions, you can contact me through this email and I will be happy to help out, too.
Here’s the link to download the app:
Peace,
Whitney
Wow. This is brilliant commentary and I am sharing it. xo