Many people born in the late eighties through the mid-nineties — or as someone my age thinks of them, you kids — have faced some sort of an existential crisis in the last couple of years. That’s because they were born with the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, which in the last few years has been messed with by the Uranus-Pluto Square, and Pluto is still within conjunction range of the natal Uranus-Neptune conjunction in those charts. Since two of the outermost planets are involved, this transit is a long and slow one, grinding away in the background of everything, both good days and bad days. One way of coping with this is to make a spiritual leap of some sort. Spiritual leaps tend to be hard to define and difficult to achieve at will. Fortunately now you can get one from the Mall of America.
“What’s this?” I hear you say. “We’re millennials! Malls are a living symbol of everything that’s wrong with consumerism! We’re not into the whole materialism thing (unless we buy it from a boutique or online or something).” To which I can only respond with: “Calm down there Bernie. Pull up an organic fair-trade coffee and hear me out. You could learn something from the Mall of America, and so could we all.”
For those of you unfamiliar with it, Mall of America (which was “born” — opened, that is — on August 11, 1992 at 10:00 AM in Bloomington, Minnesota, and thus has the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in its birth chart) is the largest shopping mall in the United States. I’ve been there. It’s gigantic. Like, mind-bogglingly gigantic. It has its own wedding chapel, its own counter-terrorism unit, and an aquarium you can walk through. If you spent five minutes in each of its stores, you would be shopping for nearly two days straight. If capitalism was a religion, the Mall of America would be something like St. Peter’s Basilica and Joel Osteen’s enormous Glass Palace of a church and the Temple Mount all in one.
The Mall of America is very, very large.
What spiritual lesson can we possibly learn from this place? Speaking as someone who has actually been there, I would have never thought in a million years that The Mall of America would be making an important spiritual point… except perhaps unintentionally. But today mall management announced that they will be closing on Thanksgiving so that the mall’s thousands of employees can spend the day with their friends and family.
For those of you who are not deeply immersed in American culture, let me explain. In America, Thanksgiving is a holiday where people commemorate how some of the first European settlers in America were helped out by the native population, and both sides came together to celebrate a successful harvest. The settlers were so grateful for the help from their native friends that it was almost fifty years before they began slaughtering them.
As with all major American holidays, Thanksgiving has grown and transmuted and achieved its final form: an excuse for a sale. Thanksgiving has turned into one of America’s biggest annual origins of spending, and the Mall of America taking a pass on that is something like McDonald’s going full vegan for a day: it’s the rare example of a large corporate entity realizing that, although its purpose is to make money, there are some things more important than making money.
Sure, Mall of America is getting some good publicity from this, and that will probably pay off in the long run. But I’m choosing not to be cynical about this. And if you are one of those people who are experiencing transiting Pluto conjunct your Uranus and Neptune, choosing not to be cynical about things is probably the wisest first step you can take.
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