anniversaries

It's forty years since Soviet tanks rolled over the border of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

It's also seventeen years since Gorbachev was briefly placed under house arrest and Yeltsin had his finest hour atop the tanks of the Tamanskaya regiment defending the Russian White House against the Kremlin.

It's nearly seven years since the world - at least the northern hemisphere - changed irrevocably.

This year sees Pluto's return to Capricorn for the first time in approximately 250 years.

One of the characteristics of heart paths seems to be that they are not straight or direct or logical. Or easily expressed. Maybe it's only in my head that these four anniversaries are connected, but then the heart connects everything, so here goes.

Pluto's transits of Capricorn are interesting. A very very quick search through the time lines shows that during the last one in the quarter century from c.1765, America claimed its independence from Britain, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published and the Industrial Revolution began. In other words, the foundations of both capitalism and the United States, still just about the dominant capitalist power, were laid.

During the transit before that, European society was shifting from medieval to modern through the Renaissance and the rise of Protestantism. 250 years before that, the reign of Kublai Khan appears to coincide with Pluto in Capricorn. In the 11thC transit, the Chinese began to print paper money and Cnut, one of the more memorable of English kings, ruled. The best remembered of Cnut's predecessors, Alfred the Great, was on the English throne during the 9thC transit. Unfortunately the Council of Nicea does not fit with Pluto in Capricorn but St Augustine of Hippo and St Patrick do, and the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian belongs in the one before.

Back to capitalism. As a teenager, I could not have articulated why it is is flawed. Despite the background frets about' The Overdraft', my family was financially comfortable and I had no reason to question. Except it was 1968 and plenty of other people were questioning everything that year. I was not impressed by Tariq Ali or Danny the Red, but Aleksander Dubcek and the Prague Spring captured my heart. Communism with a human face made absolute sense. To see it crushed was a great sadness. I still honour Jan Palach.

Later, I learned the people of Czechoslovakia who offered red roses to the invading Russian soldiers came so close to turning them to their side that the Soviet generals had to replace Russians with troops from Soviet Central Asia, whose command of Russian was poor and whose obedience to orders was more reliable.

Later still, I learned that while at Moscow University in the 1950s, Gorbachev shared a room with a Czech student who went on to serve as one of Dubcek's ministers. Apparently the two students discussed at great length how to reform communism. Gorbachev inspired me much as Dubcek did, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was as joyful an experience as the release of Nelson Mandela. As I honour Palach, I honour the unnamed man who walked in front of the tanks in Tianamen Square, because his courage I am sure inspired the many people in Eastern Europe who broke the yoke of tyranny. He was absolute proof of the difference one individual can make.

As you can see, my heroes are those who attempt to hold the middle ground. I loathed the restrictions the Communist regimes placed on individual freedoms, while I could see the value of some aspects of Soviet life, particularly the respect for education and culture and friendships. In 1985 I felt safe to take a ride in a private taxi from somewhere out in the suburbs of Leningrad to my hotel at 1am. When the very raffish looking gold toothed driver discovered I was born in Manchester, he refused to accept any money because Man U was his favourite football team. I would not dream of hitching in St Petersburg.

During Yeltsin's premiership, there was a chance that Russia would find the middle ground between the communist command economy and free market capitalism. I knew an English consultant close to Yeltsin's advisers who was advocating structures that rewarded individual effort and simultaneously encouraged the provision of high quality social services. It looked brilliant on paper, but unfortunately greed ran rampant. The centre did not hold.

In 1989, I had my first lesson in the implications of interconnectedness. I am still learning them, but one thing I am sure of. Capitalism in its exploitation of finite resources and of people is profoundly disconnected. Although one of the originators of communism had some respect for the planet - Engels wrote almost mystically of Mother Nature - the communist experiment has proved as disconnected as capitalism.

So (tortuously) I come to the third of the anniversaries, 9/11. About the time the first tower was hit, I was driving through Lockerbie unaware that world was changing. When I heard the news, I barely knew what the World Trade Centre was. The first thought, as opposed to feeling, I had was, "This was done by people who do not know it's one world to people who do not know it's one world." However unPc they are, those are the exact words in my mind. As there had been for Yeltsin in the economic sphere in 1992/3, in 2001 there was a chance for Bush to do something different, something heart-centred, something that could reflect the love expressed in so many of the last phone calls from the Towers.

But the path of vengeance was chosen, and it seems likely that that was the intention all along. (I cannot look at the photographs of the Pentagon that were taken before the collapse of the facade without asking how come the walls are unmarked by the impact of several tons of aeroplane engine.)

So I return to Pluto hovering around the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn. I look back at the momentous changes that occurred in the last two transits. I remember the havoc Pluto wreaked on my life until I learned its lessons as it steamed over 5 of my natal planets. I contemplate the screaming need for change in human attitudes and actions that the earth is expressing as the rain pours down on Scotland while east Africa and Australia shrivel in unremitting sun.

Pluto will insist that our structures change. And this time I pray we will collectively let go the old gracefully and rebuild only that which reflects our interconnectedness.