It was dark in our bedroom, except for the glow from my lover’s laptop. I was falling asleep to the sound of her fingers tapping, when I heard her sigh, “Oh no.”

I jerked awake. “What is it?”

“They executed Hussein. Now all hell is gonna break loose.”

“That was fast,” I responded. I fell back asleep, escaping from an excess of reality.

Now it’s a new day and an old year. As I write this, my lover’s family is rushing around, packing bathing suits and pillows and sandwiches. We are all going to celebrate the year’s turning at a friend’s house in Puemblo.

I am closed away in my sunlit study, hoarding today’s newspaper. I just rolled it up to kill a fly which somehow got locked in here with me. When I unroll it again, I read the emphatic headline, “Hussein Died by Hanging”. Underneath, there’s a picture of protestors in New Delhi, carrying signs lauding Hussein as a fighter against terrorism and colonialism.

I’m not a fan of Saddam Hussein by any stretch. He will go down in history as a tyrant who murdered anyone who looked at him cross-eyed, much worse than George Bush. But I am sick of the bloodshed, and this looks to me like a fresh wound in the dove’s hide.

Can we expect something different from the new year? What will 2007 bring?

Saturn will still be in Leo through most of the year, entering Virgo in September. Leo is the sign of authority and leadership, and Saturn, in its role as the Reaper, did cut down quite a few of the mighty in 2006. Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Bill Frist, J. Dennis Hastert, Scooter Libby, Trent Lott and Donald Rumsfeld all took dives from positions of power. And other notable ex-dictators besides Hussein died - Pinochet, Milosevic.

2007 will bring more of the same, at least until September. Looking at GWB’s chart, though, I think he will make it through the year just fine. He may not have all that much fun, since Saturn will go over his Venus. Laura could get sick of his whining and decide to stop sleeping with him, with Uranus conjuncting her moon in 2007. If she didn’t happen to be living in the White House, she’d probably go off and rent her own apartment.

Things don’t look so sanguine for Cheney, with the trickiest aspects hitting sensitive spots in his chart. One way or another, I don’t think he will be in power at the end of 2007.

Will we see peace in 2007? I wish I could say yes. But Jupiter’s passage into Sagittarius makes the year an even more fiery and passionate one. Executing Hussein added just one more match to the conflagration. This is a year in which lots of folks will be inspired to die for their convictions, and all that wild-eyed zealotry doesn’t make any of us safer.

What’s the answer? The passion of the peace-lovers must be equal to the passion of the religious fanatics. We must believe in ourselves as strongly and as purely as they do, and Jupiter in Sagittarius does lend itself to that.

The major transit of 2007 will be the opposition between Saturn in Leo and Neptune in Aquarius. In 2006, this was exact in late August, and coincided with some major airline crashes. In 2007, it will be exact twice more – in early March and late June. It’s a conflict between fire and air, between insistent action and dispassionate idealism.

Saturn in Leo gives a strong sense of entitlement which can manifest as tyranny (as in Adolph Hitler) or in a more benevolent style of leadership (as in Bill Clinton). Neptune in Aquarius is fascinated by truth and knowledge, and this can range from a belief in Superman (as in Friedrich Nietzsche) to a claiming of women’s rights (as in Victoria Woodhull).

Both Leo and Aquarius can be very stubborn, intractable signs. Leo holds to the belief in individual expression, and Aquarius to the belief in universal truth. And so 2007’s Leo/Aquarius clash will be a fixed battle between strong personalities and equally strong opinions. And with Jupiter and Pluto both in excitable, extravagant, expansive Sagittarius, every skirmish will be that much more dramatic and volatile.

January 2007 isn’t so explosive, though. The Saturn/Neptune opposition gets stronger by the end of the month, but it won’t be in orb until early February. The full moon of January 3 shows Uranus in Pisces in a mediator position between the sun and moon, and this gives lots of creative energy. Uranus in Pisces is the oddball mystic (as in Nostradamus). You can visualize this planet as an old hippie, taking the tight energy of the full moon and weaving a macramé basket-holder out of it.

And so the full moon of January is a great time to make positive change – in your own life, in the world, in the U.S. Congress. There will be a general sense that we don’t need so many rules and laws, we just need to groove on each other’s auras.

The new moon on January 18 is less mellow, with a Jupiter/Uranus square. This will be the energy behind the big peace march in DC on January 27.

Jupiter in Sagittarius represents community enthusiasm, expressed in marching and cheering and flag-waving. But Jupiter by itself prefers to be respectable, and the square from Uranus will challenge it. The community will be motivated to question the status quo, to take a more revolutionary stance, and to alter time-honored traditions. Uranus in Pisces holds out for a more peaceful, holistic and spiritual way of living in the world.

And so in January, we can make a good beginning for 2007. And after that, the main thing we’ll have to remember is to be generous and flexible with each other. We don’t need to have power over other people, and we don’t need to be right all the time.

And we don’t need to take the lives of other human beings. If none of us is justified in murdering another person, why do our governments kill? Are they not acting for us?

Saturn in Leo kills because it’s in his power to do so, and Neptune in Aquarius kills in the name of principle. In 2007, we need to challenge both sides of this opposition, and to find the middle path. This will be a fiery year, but it doesn’t have to singe us. We can contain the fire, channel it, use it to motivate us.

Every few minutes, I hear the sound of firecrackers outside. Everyone in the neighborhood is getting revved up to celebrate the change of years. It’s noisy, it’s exciting, it’s rambunctious, but nobody gets hurt. This would be a good soundtrack for 2007.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com