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Saturn Square Uranus, And Sparrows (Part One): The Collective

“…We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.”
-William Shakespeare
Hamlet

I’ve written many times over the years about the many creatures that have wandered into my yard. Never once though have I written about sparrows. Forgive my lack of attention to this until now.

Sparrows are sort of the lowliest video-game NPCs of urban nature, like the nearly faceless background characters in a game like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption. One may may have a generic line or two to say before it flies off, and that’s about it. Nonetheless: I learned something about life (and astrology) today, watching the sparrows at the bird feeder in my front yard.

They often gather in the tree in a group of a dozen or more — but only two or three occupy the bird feeder at a time. Often when a third sparrow shows up there, the largest of the other two will drive it off and make it wait its turn. Every once in awhile they will knock a bunch of seeds on the sidewalk, and then all the birds feast. But it’s mostly first come, first serve.

This is their routine. This is how sparrows make a living.

The mysterious Ginger Cat of the neighbourhood, whom I wrote about here before, is always trying to catch one of the sparrows but is never successful. I watched the sparrows go through their feeding routine today while the ginger cat tried so hard to catch one.

Sometimes the cat gets tired. In today’s case though, a trio of crows swept in, like a loud wing of AR-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft diving in on a terrorist caravan. I doubt this was because of some elaborate mutual defense treaty between the sparrows and the crows. Crows don’t have any reason to like cats either.

After the cat was gone, the sparrows returned to their usual routine of eating and hassling each other over the food — even though there’s obviously enough for all of them. This is good news for the sparrows, mostly, and I am certain they had an attitude of “oh good things, are finally back to normal.”

But of course that will eventually change, as everything in life does. The cycles, they repeat.

***

Life in the time of the Saturn Uranus square, all year long, has seemed like one long struggle. This aspect will still be in effect until early next year and it has made for huge disruption for many. I refer of course to the pandemic, but also to the social effects that have followed on. The same patterns of fear and blame and confusion and finger-pointing always recur during a pandemic — but history is too boring to actually learn something from it, right?

So what hope is there for any of us as individuals, when the very Heavens seem to be compelling us to be at such terrible unease? Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you the secret of getting through this. Bring birdseed.