In contrast to the dark-green rhododendrons and towering pine [...]]]> 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.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just [...]]]> Astrology is the study of patterns as they play out through time.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just the usual way of doing things, until something comes along to change, upset or improve old standbys.

It’s pretty easy to tell when something’s a routine as opposed to an addiction, a rhythm as opposed to a habit. Though each word means essentially the same thing, we can feel it in our bones when the pattern is unhealthy, or comforting, or neutral. But the etymology of these words can give us further insight into how the things we do repeatedly — Saturday morning chores, for example, or singing a particular lullaby to a child, or that six-pack you just can’t get through the evening without — affect the deep psyche.

Addiction comes from the Latin root deik-, which means “to show or pronounce solemnly.” From the same root grew words like dictate, ditto, indict, verdict and jurisdiction, giving “addiction” the feel of a judicial, gavel-banging, authoritative pronouncement. The addict is indicted. The verdict is dictated. It’s hard to escape an addiction, or fight it, or squirm out from under it. We can only get off for good behavior.

In the horoscope chart, we might look to the fixed cross — the 2nd and 8th houses, the 5th and 11th — to understand our unhealthy repetitive behaviors: how we embody Sysiphus in our own lives, and what healing god we might call upon inside ourselves to get out of our addictive cycles.

Ritual comes from rite, which is rooted in the basic Latin ar-, which means “to fit together,” and which spawned all sorts of English words including arm, art, order, reason and rhyme. A ritual, then, is like a piece of the puzzle falling into place, making sense of something chaotic. It is a small part of the larger whole, a connector that helps us make elegant the empty spaces of life, that infuses our days and weeks with meaning.

Ritual may be the other side of the addiction coin, the bright face of addictive darkness. Perhaps addiction is a expression of the search for meaning, an expression that took a wrong turn. Like addiction, ritual appeals to the senses and meets a need for soothing. But done authentically and practiced faithfully, ritual — unlike addiction — should lead to order and connection instead of chaos and isolation.

There are, of course, rituals that become meaningless or unhealthy, for example through overuse or misuse or because the act of placing the puzzle piece has continued long past the need for the puzzle’s meaning or message. In this case, the ritual may become an addiction because lack of courage, or lack of creativity, prevents a person from seeing life anew, from building new rituals that reflect life’s current rhythms.

In the horoscope chart, we can again look at the fixed cross to understand how to recreate addictions as rituals: what rituals might meet the need that the addiction is currently fulfilling. Of course, there are other elements too — the planets and signs and other houses as well — that must be considered depending on the nature and need of the addiction.

I got into this whole train of thought intially because I’m reading Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven by Barbara J. Patterson and Pamela Bradley. The book describes the Waldorf educational philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms in children’s lives. Rhythm comes from the Latin root sreu-, which means “to flow.” In the Greek, it’s rhuthmos, meaning “measure or recurring motion.” The word is also related to bodily flushings such as diarrhea and catarrh; the rock rhyolite; rheuma (the humors of the body); and possibly to the Russian struga, meaning “a deep place.”

What strikes me about rhythm is that its word associations encompass so much: fluid, cyclical motion and the stillness, the hardness, of rock; the humors of the body and their occasional purging outbursts; the plain, mundane task of measuring time and the shrouded, sacred mysteries of life’s deep places. There’s a yin-yang feel to this word family, a sense that rhythm must include both external expression and internal pondering; both silence and noise; both stillness and motion. In fact, Patterson and Bradley suggest that preschool days should be ordered in an external-internal-external-internal “breathing-type” rhythm so as to encourage children’s exuberance while also preventing them from spinning out of control and becoming enslaved to the barrage of sensory input all around them.

The book also makes the point that rhythms come from without and within. If we are attentive and aware and not so out of control in our lives, we internalize the external rhythms that surround us. Our bodies and senses can respond with rituals that anchor the beginnings and endings of each rhythmic cycle — rituals that mark the turn of morning into noontime, the fading of brash summer into more ponderous fall, the growth of child into adolescent into adult. The word “ritual” often carries a religious flavor in our culture, but it doesn’t have to. Its importance is in placing a puzzle piece in such a way that meaning and connection are forged in the life.

Keeping that caveat in mind, psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung famously wrote to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

[The] craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness … You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (Source)

If we are attentive to the rhythms that order the physical universe around us, we then, perhaps, do not need addictive behavior but, instead, meaningful ritual to order our lives. Rites that give physical space, plenty of time and honored acknowledgment to change, growth, loss and newness can go a long way to connect our souls to the larger rhythms of life, to feel how we ourselves are pieces in the larger puzzle of the universal order. We do not, then, need addiction because our spiritual thirst is slaked by something else.

Rhythms are patterns, ways of ordering our time and our senses, that emerge from authentic depth, from time-tested processes, rather than from our own momentary behaviors — based on anxiety, desire or compulsion — injected into the matrix of time. Disconnected from the rhythms of life, we seek addiction: something dependable, comforting — yet ultimately disconnecting. When we are in touch with those larger rhythms, though, we can then connect with others, with the world, with the Divine — and with ourselves. That connection can be achieved and expressed through ritual, through the placement of the ordered pieces into the big picture of life.

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Nothing has really changed in my life in that time. I’m just grumpy.

I’m not usually a transit-checker — that is, I don’t wake up every morning and check where Venus is in my chart, or the Moon, or whatever. I know approximately where the outer planets are, and I [...]]]> I’ve been grumpy for a couple of days.

Nothing has really changed in my life in that time. I’m just grumpy.

I’m not usually a transit-checker — that is, I don’t wake up every morning and check where Venus is in my chart, or the Moon, or whatever. I know approximately where the outer planets are, and I try to watch what I say when Mercury is retrograde, but I don’t live and die by my transits.

But this morning I had to check them out. Because the inexplicable grumpiness was getting to me.

Sure enough, there was Mars sitting right on my natal Sun-Mercury conjunction, opposite Saturn: a driving force in my life and personality.

If you’re not an astrologer, that last sentence won’t mean much to you. What’s important to know is that, when Mars energy bursts into a major part of your personality, even for a short period of time, that part of you can get pretty energized — for better or for worse.

If you’re not in full awareness and possession of yourself, as I haven’t been the last couple days, Mars energy can get pretty prickly, pretty quickly. I’ve been snapping at my three-year-old, feeling edgy and tense, defiant and selfish. On the other hand, the whole house is clean and I’ve done more walking and weight-lifting this week than I’ve done in ages.

See, Mars is productive and physical as well as angry and irritated.

It’s a good example of how each planet and sign has both positive and negative manifestations. At the core of each planet is not good or bad but, simply, energy.

Mars contains the energy of output and individuality. It’s like the first yelp of a baby as it emerges from the womb. It can be a yelp of pain and protest, or a yelp of concerted effort, or a yelp of productive breathing, or simply a yelp that says, “Hey! I’m here! Look at me!” The important thing is that the yelp occurs: The baby is bringing individual energy up from inside, out into expression in the world.

Some people feel Mars-like most of the time; it means Mars is prominent or particularly energized in their horoscope chart and personality. (On the other hand, people with a weaker Mars may try to make up for it by adopting Martian habits — but feel woefully inadequate about them.) We see strong expressions of Mars energy in sports figures, soldiers, drummers and Nike’s “Just Do It!” slogan. We also see it in red-faced anger, mouthing off, reckless driving and crimes of passion. It’s no wonder that professional football players, for example, have a reputation for getting into trouble — and that their fans sometimes cross the line between excited cheering and incited rioting. It’s all on the Mars continuum: It’s output of physical, productive, creative, instinctive, freely-expressed energy.

When we feel Mars energy bubble up in our lives — and we especially tend to feel it in our bodies — we might first feel irritated or angry for no reason we can readily identify. Or maybe we can identify the reason, but it’s something that wouldn’t have bothered us last week. Or it’s something that always gets to us but we feel like a hamster on a wheel with it: running, running, running with no productivity, no resolution.

For me, this week, it was my preschooler’s clinginess — an apt example because Mars wants to be free and independent, able to choose where and when to go, and what to do, tied down to no one. The Dragon’s clinging and whining this week made me feel angry and trapped, whereas in other weeks I’m able to take it in stride, address it, soothe it and move on. Not this week: Instead, I felt like a volcano about to explode. I’m actually planning to spend this evening out so I can indulge my need for freedom and independence instead of giving into irritation and anger. I hope I can return a little calmer, having gotten my short spell of freedom.

It’s really important to be aware of when Mars stirs your anger. However Mars is situated in your chart, if you haven’t learned to manage your anger, certain triggers — a child’s defiance, a spouse’s socks on the floor, a boss’s tone — could set it off at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, many people suppress irritation and anger because it’s not considered polite to show it. This can, of course, be just as damaging: Witness the ample evidence that the stress of suppression is connected to heart attack and other ills.

It might seem strange, but both hair-trigger anger and suppressed anger are sourced in the same place: the inability to manage Mars energy productively. Mars is not anger; anger is one expression of Mars energy. But that energy can be channeled into a more productive and creative place. Primal scream therapy is a quintessential example of this channeling, though other activities — like cleaning house, going for a walk, lifting weights, mowing the lawn, drumming, listening to loud music or having (safe and respectful) sex — will do just as well.

Astrologer Robert Hand says:

One way to ensure that a Mars transit will not cause disputes or arguments with others … is to have plenty of hard work to do. The negative side of Mars most often manifests itself when there is no other outlet for its energies. (Source)

Maybe, instead of anger management, we should call it Mars management. That would acknowledge the more productive and creative uses of this wild, unruly energy instead of dissing it completely. Because, like a needy child, Mars gets really, really, really pissed when it’s ignored.

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Of course, I have other tools, too, like feelings, family, friends and faith. Astrology isn’t always the first place I go, especially in the midst of tragedy, but I often end up there, searching for clarity, groping toward meaning.

So when a [...]]]> I don’t use astrology to predict events. I use it to help make sense of life.

Of course, I have other tools, too, like feelings, family, friends and faith. Astrology isn’t always the first place I go, especially in the midst of tragedy, but I often end up there, searching for clarity, groping toward meaning.

So when a dear friend was killed this weekend in a horrible accident, my first reaction was gasping disbelief. Second came a deep and jagged grief. Third, a need to connect with other friends who loved her. Then, as the reality coursed through me, came numbness, and emptiness.

This morning, because I am who I am, I awoke yearning to understand the senselessness of her death through the perspective of my craft of astrology.

Why does it hurt so much that she’s gone?

Why can’t I grasp that she went the way she did?

What are we supposed to do, anyway, with grief?

I’m not pretentious enough to claim I found answers. But below are my thoughts, the small bits of meaning I glimpsed as I pondered the sudden, premature, tragic death of a beautiful, life-loving woman.

I wrote on Friday about the way astrology views the usual cycle of energy that guides an event, whether it’s the blossoming of a flower, the unfolding of a life or the movement of seasons. There is output, then enjoyment, then — usually; hopefully — slow shifts that dismantle the old order and prepare for the next cycle. I pointed out how important it is to take time when contemplating great changes to an old way of being, how rushing change could lead to crisis. I thought I was talking about politics, and money.

The suddenness of Heather’s death interrupts our sense of how time unfolds. Life is supposed to spin out evenly from its spool, one long flowing arc at a time. When it doesn’t, we say things like: “How can this be?” And: “I can’t believe it.” And: “It just doesn’t make sense.” A sudden, tragic end to a life doesn’t fit into the expected patterns of our mind, nor the gently sloping pathways of our hearts. Life is supposed to allow us some time to get used to change, to learn what we need ahead of time, to shift our gaze toward the next phase. It’s not meant to thrust us into loss all at once. At the very, very least, life is supposed to allow us a bit of time to say goodbye.

When death comes unanticipated, we don’t know what to do with ourselves: our hands, our voices, the alarm rising up in our chests. Our minds: What are we supposed to even think?

Often, then, not knowing what to do, we turn to the specifics of the departed person herself. This is the other way I can look to astrology to make sense of this loss. Because it occurred to me that, while astrology views each planet and sign as a symbol of an internal personal trait, other people in our lives also carry some traits for us — especially, perhaps, the ones we’re not able to manifest well ourselves. We need them to show us the way, the proper expression of laughter, or confidence, or drivenness.

I kept remembering, yesterday, how much Heather simply embraced life — how deeply she drank in the pleasures of the world all around her. She seemed always engaged, passionate about everything from coffee to music to movies to the people she loved. She laughed easily. She teased and admonished and was always good-natured. She seemed to let troubles roll off her back, shooing them away like flies.

Other traits might stand out more for other people, depending who they are and how they related with her. But whatever the specific experience, in relationship generally, each person brings something that the other needs in their life. Sometimes it’s the thing that drives us crazy; sometimes it’s the thing we most admire. Sometimes we don’t even notice the trait till they are gone. And when they are gone, we are left holding our hands out, waiting for more of what they brought: that passion, or that teasing, or that laughter. And when it doesn’t come — again, we don’t know what to do.

We have, then, to find her elsewhere — not to replace her, but to fill the emptiness her death leaves in our lives. Maybe, hopefully, we find her gifts in ourselves.

So my questions now are: What gifts did Heather give me that I could not accept when she was alive? What traits did I unconsciously ask her to hold that I could not yet make a part of myself? What do I need to become, now that she is no longer there to be it for me? I look at the list above and know immediately.

And so to celebrate Heather’s life, and to defy the tragedy of her death, I promise myself, and my family, and my friends, to cling less fiercely to worry — to let it go — so I can sink much more into each delectable moment life hands me, the way I saw her do.

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