Picture of the Week: Saturn, Survival and Succulents

I first heard the word succulent in reference to desert flora when I moved to Los Angeles 11 years ago. Before that, I’d always thought they were called cacti. The word succulent struck me as odd because I always associated the word with something juicy, luscious and fleshy.

In contrast to the dark-green rhododendrons and towering pine trees of my youth, these desert plants — with their pale green skin, lean bodies and pointy spikes, growing, it seemed, straight up out of hard, dry rocks — said anything but succulent to me.

Turns out that succulents are far from dry, that they’re the camels of the plant world. That is, they need plenty of water, but they’re structured to survive in places that get little rain: Like camels, they don’t eschew water. They store it. That’s what makes cacti succulent indeed.

That’s also what makes a planet like Saturn functional — or not, as the case may be. Like a cactus, Saturn certainly doesn’t seem watery, but it has a talent for storing things up until they’re needed: food, water, resources, memory.

That’s because Saturn’s core function is physical awareness. It’s responsible for helping you identify how your body is doing at any given moment in time; what it needs and doesn’t need; how well it’s resourced and for how much time; whether you can safely partake of the food in front of you now, or need to wait, to stretch out your supplies. Saturn cautions you against pushing too hard and tells you when to pull back. It defends against intrusions on your safety and signals when you’re threatened, calling in the troops to help protect you. It stores body memories so you can react when similar threats might come again in the future.

While we often think of Saturn as a “hard planet,” or at least a difficult one, that may be because our culture tends more toward ambition, excess and instant gratification. We don’t want to wait to drink of our stores; we want to quench our thirst right now. We insist on climbing higher. More is better. If we’re not growing, we feel stagnant, panicky.

But in the end, all of Saturn’s effort to ensure physical awareness works to ensure the survival of the body. In Greek mythology, Icarus’s father, Daedalus, played the Saturn role, warning his son not to fly too close to the Sun as they escaped from Crete. Icarus ignored him and fell to his death in the sea. If we are too lured by solar ambition and self-importance, we may sacrifice our Saturnine safety. It is not as fun, fantastical and free, but it is necessary to the continuation of the species as a whole and our individual lives in particular.

Of course Saturn has a correlating psychological function — which is not likely found in desert plants — and that is to be aware of one’s emotional, social and spiritual limits as well. With Saturn, everything moves slowly, and it does so for a reason: It wants to preserve us. It wants us not to burn out. It wants us to protect ourselves even as we slowly unfold into our true selves. It wants us to be like succulents, saving what we need so we can survive (and thrive) for the long haul.