Depth Astrology » Saturn

The Wilderness in the Horoscope — Part 2

Kathy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:05:58 +0000

In a recent post I asserted that there is no clear archetype of nature in the horoscope. I want to take that back, kind of. There are actually several symbols that could be different faces of the nature archetype — for example Mars’s wild instinct and Venus’s sensuousness and the abundance of Jupiter — but I’m going to go out on a limb (ha!) and call out the least “wild” of all archetypes as the horoscope’s fullest embodiment of nature.

Saturn.

In western astrology, Saturn is so often associated with doubt, fear and loathing, but every archetype has its light and shadow, and those associations are really, in my view, just potent bastardizations of Saturn’s good side. For, from the Huber perspective, Saturn is the matrix, the ground, the wellspring of security beneath our feet — the mother, even. (Before you take up arms against the idea of Saturn being the mother, let me assure you I’ll post about that soon enough.)

While Saturn may not imply abundance the way Jupiter does, it is the embodiment of the physical world — the roots, the trunk, the spreading-out of leaves, the slow and steady growth, a sort of integrative ability: the drive to take things into oneself — sun, rain, soil — and to distribute them according to need, in order create a productive system that is greater than the sum of its parts: a tree, a frog, an internally balanced ecosystem, a cohesive and secure family.

Saturn also embodies the arduous, enduring path toward that creation, and the patience of time spooling through the cycles of life, the inevitability of what follows: spring, summer, autumn, winter; pregnancy, birth, growth, death; inspiration, thought, action, results. It is not impetuous or unpredictable, except on the longest of timelines — who but the Divine could have foreseen that butterflies, for instance, would emerge from the Big Bang? — rather, like nature, Saturn is evolutionary, making incremental changes that are rooted in the seeds that have already been sown.

Saturn is, then, the keeper of the gate, the guardian of the rules of how a process must unfold. And though we tend — in our planned and organized society — to associate wilderness with chaos, the reality is that the wilderness depends on rules, on systems, on order for its very survival. If summer did not follow spring, if flowers did not condense into berries, if forest fires did not provide the raw material for regrowth, the wilderness would truly be chaos, and desolate. But humans’ first problem with Saturn is that, in our hands, within the confines of our small egos, Saturn wants to control the rules, the unfolding, of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the Life/Death/Life Nature. We want to decide when it’s time for something to end: a relationship, a project, a life.

If we are conscious and humble and sincere in our motives, we might get that chance. If we are not, Saturn will render our endings for us, through crisis, ugliness and fear. And so Saturn is also the reaper, the symbol of the eventual unfolding, in due time, of what is sown. And here, again, we resist because the rest of the Saturn cycle has been reassuring, safety-making, connective and secure. We get used to the activity of sowing and tending whatever it is we are sowing and tending — a seed, a project, a relationship — forgetting that the seeds we are planting will eventually blossom and fruit with whatever pulse of energy we have poured into them. And when the fruit is ready to be transformed, we buck back. We want to hold the ripe, juicy fruit in our hands forever. But we can’t. It must become food, or it must shrivel and die.

This happens in nature all the time — both the nature without and the nature within. Internally, the transformation process is the ultimate test of authenticity and survival. Saturn seems to trouble us because we don’t want change and in its matrix we believe we will find the safety of changelessness. But we won’t. Because for as much as we astrologers associate Saturn with retrenchment and contraction, it is more about the inevitability of evolution. And if we retrench in the face of inevitability — if we embrace fear instead of the slow tectonic shifts of life’s seasons — then nature, Saturn, will find a way to crowbar us out of the ground beneath our feet. She will throw us into the wilds to find our own deep path toward survival.

Photo credit: Micky

Picture of the Week: I Heart Boys and Girls

Kathy — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:51:19 +0000

Funny, after what seems to be a lifetime of being female-oriented — going to a women’s college, working in lots of women-owned and women-dominated businesses (including at a women’s PAC), being generally very pro-female and pro-feminist — boys seem to be springing up everywhere in my life these days. I blame Jung and the tension of opposites.

I knew my first child was going to be a boy, and I was right (call it intuition if you want), but I was 99% sure my second child — the one still twisting and gestating in my belly — would be a girl.

Nope. Bubbaloo, as he’s been dubbed till he emerges, is full-on boy as well. Two sons!? I never really considered the possibility that I would be the only family member without a Y. Or, on a more positive note, with a very fine double-dose of X.

And then there’s this freelance work I’m doing, writing grant proposals for a boys’ mentoring program. I’ve been engrossed in distressing research about how the school system is stacked against boy energy; how boys receive messages that set up a struggle between traditional masculinity and contemporary ideals; how, despite appearances, boys’ self-esteem is actually quite fragile; and so on.

The knee-jerk part of me wants to say, Oh, waaah. Get over it. Let me tell you about being female. But the therapist, the mother, the wife and — yes — the feminist in me shush the reactionary, not just with concern for the boys and men I know and love but also with increasingly clear glimpses of how very, very important it is for women that men, too, are deeply understood and valued. Not valued for their traditional power/control/management roles but for their natural, wild, authentic maleness.

And, while we’re at it, how very important that women can claim and integrate traditionally masculine features and that men can claim and integrate traditionally feminine features.

One of the traditional elements of maturing in our society — the rite of passage — has largely been lost to both genders. Oh, the trappings are still there among some sub-populations: confirmation, debutante balls, fraternity hazings. But none that I know of (and admittedly I don’t know them all) carries the deep drumbeat of the initiation process that characterizes a traditional rite of passage: the conscious, ritualized separation from the former, more childish self; the dreamlike hang-time in liminal space; the sense of accomplishing feats of physical and mental survival; the deliberate opening to and cultivation of adult spiritual wisdom; the reincorporation, as an adult, into the society where one was once a child.

In astrological terms, the rite of passage is/was a sort of “graduation” from unconscious, undifferentiated Mars/Venus energy into a firmer grasp of gender energies on a more subtle, conscious, individual level — from Mars to Sun (mental will and awareness) and from Venus to Saturn (physical security and awareness). In other words, it is the movement from the communal energy of the lower half of the chart to the individuated energy of the upper half through the fires of the most fundamental questions of identity: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? With luck, depth and wise guidance, the initiate may even glimpse Pluto and Uranus energy during this process.

When a boy or girl can claim their gender birthright, not as prescribed behaviors like flirting or competing or giggling or dominating, but as unique, self-aware expressions of their individual mix of gender — XX, XY or some lovely soup of the spectrum in-between — then a rite of passage has taken place. We move away from stereotyped gender roles and into the embrace of all possibilities within, able to move in and out of stereotypical maleness, femaleness and gender-neutrality with much more ease, assurance and spiritual wisdom than we did as children.

And we become able, as it seems too few do in contemporary life, to turn around to the generation that follows, to become mentors and guides to the boys and girls behind us, who still struggle to understand what it means to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman — or anything else, for that matter — in today’s society. The astrological archetypes are not the only container for these energies, for this process, but they are vivid and tangible ones that can be useful guides along the way.

Can you identify a rite of passage in your life? Was it intentional or not? How did you grow through it? What did you sacrifice and what did you gain? Who guided you? What archetypal energies — masculine, feminine or anything else — were important in that journey?

Image: John Paul Bosbolo

Picture of the Day: Saturn in a Tangerine

Kathy — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:26:30 +0000

Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

And Georgia O’Keefe should know about time. She lived for ninety-nine years, from 1887 until 1986.

I recently advised a client to spend an hour eating an orange. This was not originally my idea; it came from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Peace is Every Step, a series of short but profound thoughts, such as “Tangerine Meditation” which reads, in part:

[The children] saw not only the tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree. With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. Then they saw petals falling down and the tiny green fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. … Each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and the fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or her mouth and have a mindful bite …

Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. (Source)

This, in turn, reminds me of the beautiful poem “The Shirt” by Robert Pinsky, wherein the poet sees, in his simple button-down shirt, the whole world and the whole, in its own way, of history: the farm laborers harvesting the cotton, the sweat shop workers cutting and piecing it together, the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the development of Scottish tartans, more, and more.

Astrologically, Mercury can be seen as little bits of data like Pinsky’s “The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams / The nearly invisible stitches along the collar.” It is the calories and grams of fat we eat, the telephone numbers we store in our heads, the time we’re scheduled to meet someone and the silent agreement with other drivers that we pass on the left and stop at red lights. None of life could go forward without these things, but they are not the essence or the energy of the life.

On the other hand, Jupiter is the entirety of the poem, the full-tongued experience of eating an orange, the whole breath-sucking vision of an O’Keefe. It is the sweeping view of the day, the sensory themes, the long arc of energy that embraces the whole.

And yet neither of these things is seeing a flower deeply, or taking an hour to eat an orange, or knowing your shirt so well that you feel its history. These, I would say — the interweaving, the interlocking, of many visible details into an integrated, structured whole — is Saturn. Saturn is physical, boundaried structure that binds together many small pieces into a coherent and useful whole. It is the legal code and all its individual laws, ordinances and rulings. It is the work plan and each step that must be taken. It is the mother’s security and each little thing she does — the schedule, the snacks, the snuggles — to create it.

Saturn is the way the cuticle, the xylem, the phloem, the stoma, the upper and lower epidermis, the cells, the veins arrange themselves in startling symmetry to become a single leaf. It is the way that leaf retools and restructures its resources and sends them back out into the world to sustain life.

Poor Saturn. It has been denigrated as malefic and destructive. It turns the world, sometimes, in ways that make us want to cover our ears and sing, “La la la la la la la…” But Saturn is about preserving what it important. And what is important may not always be to our liking.

Photo: didbygraham

Picture of the Week: Venus and Saturn in Conversation

Kathy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:06:40 +0000

It is archetypally surprising to see young and old, freshness and decay, coupled together in the same image.

This image puts me in mind of Robert Hand’s description of Venus opposition Saturn: youth, lightness and spontaneity juxtaposed with age, graveness and ponderousness. Hand says:

“Loneliness and self-pity sometimes come with this transit. You feel surrounded by bright, positive energies that you simply cannot relate to. You may feel like a gray presence among colorful people. … In general today, relationships will force you to encounter aspects of yourself that you would prefer not to face. However, like all oppositions, this one could heighten your self-perception and give you knowledge that will help you.” (Source, pp. 202-203)

There is a wistful feeling to this photo, as there may be to a Venus-Saturn coupling. It is as if we are within the vibrant, present moment of the young woman at the same time as we are deeply conscious — through the old building and dilapidated structures — of the long perspective of great lengths of time, either forward or past. That long perspective is dogged; we cannot shake it to simply be in the now, laughing and sightseeing and sipping coffee with our compadres. The duality in the Venus-Saturn opposition separates us from others who may be, right now, less sharply attuned to the connections between what is now and what is elsewhen. The stillness of the moment seems to span centuries.

The picture above reminds me of another image — one I’m sure you’ve seen before — that carries a similar energy. The drawing to the right may be seen as either an old woman or a young woman, depending how you look. Like the decaying building in the photo above, the old woman reminds us of what the young woman will eventually become — indeed, of what we all will eventually become.

These images remind us that — much as we resist the idea — Saturn and Venus are intimately related. They seed one another. Both are physical, feminine energies (yes! Saturn is feminine) that, at their finest, work matter into its true form in each successive moment. For Venus, the process is instinctive, responsive and spontaneous; for Saturn, the process is thoughtful, careful and planned over time.

It is interesting to me that each of these images contains a downward perspective. The woman in the photo above appears to be looking at something below her eye level, over the railing of the bridge. Both the young woman and the old woman in the drawing above appear to be looking down as well. We speak of being in the present moment as “being grounded,” yet in the horoscope chart the ground — the IC, the nadir of the chart — is the place of the past, of ancestors, of deep memory, of the collective unconscious. When we are happy, we look up. When we are wistful or sad, we look down. When we want to connect, we look across.

These images suggest the manifestation of something solidly material around ephemeral feelings, of introspection seeded by memory, of a forming, a becoming, that is watered by the ground of memory, of time, of the long, deep perspective.

Image 1: Cam Switzer
Image 2: Public domain

Picture of the Week: The Feminine Principle in the Saturn Archetype

Kathy — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:50:38 +0000

Though I believe it is hanging in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, I was unable to discover anything more about this painting, the photo of which is this week’s Picture of the Week.

There are two different schools of thought about womanhood in astrology. (Well, truth be told, there are probably many, many more. But I’m only going to discuss two of them here.) While all astrologers, to my knowledge, recognize Venus as the holder of feminine energy, most western astrologers also ascribe the mother role, and general feminine traits, to the Moon. The Huber school, on the other hand, says the Moon is gender-neutral — pertaining to emotional and contact needs — whereas Saturn represents the mother principle: It is keyed toward physical security, survival, protection, boundaries and attachment. It is most comfortable near the bottom of the chart, where it can grow roots and provide stability and assurance to the chart native. In the midst of crisis, it is this sturdy sort of mother that we all seek, not the mother figure suggested by the Moon.

But these motherly traits of sturdiness and security are not always the ones associated with femininity in popular culture. Femininity is seen as much less solid than Saturn: more emotional, changeable, flirtatious and irrational as well as tender, loving, caring and abundant. (It is this changeability, as well as this tenderness, that are sometimes missing in strong Saturn types.)

In my eyes, the picture above models the Saturn style of the feminine. Here is a woman alone with two animals: one domestic, one wild. She appears to be leading the horse, as if she has already gained mastery and command over it; she has tamed it, provided rules and boundaries, and made it dependent on her in some way. But then she comes upon a wild tiger — a beast from whom most people I know would run. Yet she holds out her hands as if to tame it, too, as if to say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” What’s more, the tiger is bowing its head at her feet, as if it already knows the woman’s power — already knows she will be the authority in the relationship.

Saturn may put reins on wild horses, but when confronted with wildness, chaos or danger a healthy Saturn will not freeze or run or kick but, instead, draw on its own resources to survive. In action films, that often means shooting guns and outrunning bad guys (more masculine, Mars-oriented stuff). But in real life, it may take fortitude, determination and creativity more than speed and strength.

A 2000 study published in Psychological Review claimed the traditional explanation of human stress response (“fight or flight”) was insufficient — particularly in females, for whom stress responses lean more toward, as the study put it, “tend and befriend” (notice it’s not an either-or but a both-and):

Behaviorally, females’ [stress] responses are more marked by a pattern of “tend-and-befriend.” Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.

So when the going gets rough, women tend: They hunker down, grow roots and ensure they and their loved ones are protected and provided for. In other words, they go all Saturn on you. They also befriend, more a function of the social Venus archetype (with a good dose of Mercury, perhaps) than of the Moon (though a healthy Moon may certainly have a role to play in befriending as well). Yet even befriending, at least for the long-term, requires some Saturn energy of sacrifice, memory and protection as well as nurturing and maintaining deep connections.

In the picture above, the woman is tending and befriending. She is holding close to her faithful friend, the horse; developing an attachment with the tiger rather than separating from it; making the tiger dependent on her rather than chasing it off; taming it, restraining its wildness the way Saturn imposes order on chaos, organizes what feels unruly, protects us from the dangers of the world. What’s more, the woman appears calm and unruffled, sure of herself, not at all hysterical or flirtatious or indecisive.

After all, she is just going about her business, tending and befriending, in order to survive the wilderness of her life.

Photo credit

Picture of the Week: Saturn, Survival and Succulents

Kathy — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:47:27 +0000

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.

The Neptune Cycle: Perceptions and Perspectives

Kathy — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:04:24 +0000

The other day a client described a certain period in her life as “foggy.”

An astrologer hears the word “foggy” and immediately thinks of Neptune, that veil of mystery shrouding us from hard reality.

What’s surprising is not that the woman’s Age Point was crossing Neptune right during the time period she spoke of, but that she woke me up to the fact that I’m going through a major Neptune cycle right now and — in true Neptune fashion — haven’t really been aware of it.

The energetic antithesis of Neptune is Saturn: the building-up of tangible structures and plans; the hard reality of life that we recognize as boundaries, rules and predictable patterns; the limits we accept because they are laws of physics or laws created by humans to ensure security, safety, certainty. Saturn is authority, hierarchy and leadership, even hegemony and control. Boundaries and expectations are clear, hard and non-negotiable.

Neptune is precisely — or, rather, imprecisely — the opposite. It’s that place in the mind, in the soul, where lines blur and boundaries dissolve and truth is relative. We’re not sure what’s real because everything seems real, and it seems possible to slip through the mists of time/space to the sands of some other place, to be transported on music or breath or lushness alone. The mind grows lax with the incomprehensibilty of the cosmos, and we hardly know where to start to accomplish what needs to be done. In fact, the to-do list itself seems elusive and uncertain. What is necessary? Why should I start now, when everything will shift tomorrow? Why don’t I just pick up this fantasy novel and…

Photo: Matt "Birdeye" Rogers

The next thing I know, sleep has descended and with it, dreams, and I really am in another time/space for a short period where the rules and realities seem as equally valid as the doubtful requirements of my waking life. Giant piles of laundry look like soft mountains to climb, and my father says something about rafting down a slow, sleepy river, and a flock of Canadian geese flies past, upside-down and speaking in British accents, and it all makes sense to me.

I know it won’t last forever, but Neptune transits aren’t quick — they meander like mountain streams in the summertime — and for my more goal-oriented mind, its energy seems life-sucking.

***

What do we do when our charts (by which I mean our psyches) are visited by energies that are antithetical to our natures?

I mean really, what do we do?

Clients often come to me when they’re in a cycle like this — not necessarily a Neptune cycle but one that goes against their typical selves. They feel like they’ve been taken over by aliens, that their normal fire has been doused by a bucket of water, or their typical ability to go with the flow has been replaced by a restlessness and dissatisfaction that they can’t escape from.

The most important thing is to recognize what’s happening, acknowledge its difficulties and realize that it won’t last forever. Next it’s important to recognize the risks of the particular energy that’s visiting. For me, where I am today, Neptune’s confusion and doubt are the worst of it. A few years ago, this transit would have manifested for me more as an alcohol problem (in fact, did so). Still others may experience Neptune as a shady, manipulative character; as illusions and delusions; as discouragement, martyrdom, idealization.

Awareness of risks allows us to protect ourselves against them — or, on the other hand, to accept them as part of our current scenario. (I don’t recommend this for really destructive risks!) Then, you can start working with the positive sides of the archetype. I mean, Neptune sounds dreamy, really, doesn’t it? I’ve never been able to rest, veg out, do nothing or sit still. I wonder what will happen if I do that, for a change?

What, then, if I allowed myself to be receptive instead of trying to act upon the world all the time? What if I made space for something else to eke through the time/space continuum toward me? What if I could think secrets were sometimes okay, could accept that I don’t have to know everything right now?

What if I watched my mind/soul for the things it’s picking up on instead of always trying so hard to have something to say? Or if I paid more attention to beauty than productivity, allowed myself to perceive leaves and spirit and soup in different ways, let myself be transported by music more often?

How would I change? How would I come back to reality, when this cycle is over, a more complete, productive and helpful person?

Where I’ve Been Lately: The Astrology of Change

Kathy — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:44:11 +0000

Two and a half weeks ago, the hard drive on my laptop crashed. Now, before you go scolding and advising, let me say that I had backed up the truly important things — photos of my son from his 2005 birth through September of this year — but I lost pretty much everything else in the meltdown: passwords and budgets and plans and rough drafts of several articles and posts and resources I was juggling all at the same time.

My parents were visiting from out of town when it happened, and Barack Obama was about to be elected President, and my son was amped up on Halloween sugar, and my husband’s employer let 75% of its workforce go — the day after he had given notice himself — and the hard drive crash just seemed like the crazy, unpredictable culmination of the whole wild frenzy.

It was as if the election excitement and the fun of a family visit and dressing up like cats and begging strangers for candy with a pit in my stomach about our family’s future just spun out of control — and years upon years of insights, ideas and musings just couldn’t take the tornado anymore, and finally crashed and burned.

It seemed like a nightmare at the time.

It’s always in retrospect that I notice these things, though. When it was happening, it just seemed like a disconnected jumble of one crazy-intense event after another. Now, I look at my horoscope chart and see the protracted themes pulling up like three long trains, crashing together in that one wild week, and I know, now, that that week was a corner-turning, of sorts, a slamming of brakes, with lots of warning lights and bells and shouting and running.

See, that was the week that the current Saturn-Uranus opposition was tightest, and sitting directly on my nodal axis on the 2/8 cusps. As well, that week, Neptune turned direct on my Descendant and Pluto remains lollygagging in square to my natal Moon. You don’t have to be an astrologer to understand when I say to you: This is a powerful little cabal of major change-makers all set on working me over at exactly the same time.

No — that’s not completely fair. The great astrologer Dane Rudhyar said:

It is not the event which happens to the person, but the person which happens to the event. An individual meets particular events because he needs them in order to become more fully what he is only potentially. (Source)

So if I reframe it instead to say that I brought myself to the events I needed in order to grow into a greater version of myself, then I have to understand what karmic reckoning I have with a Saturn-Uranus opposition.

These two planets together are catalysts for cleaning out: releasing what no longer works to make way for whatever is to come, creating a vacuum for nature to abhor and then fill with shiny fresh berries. I could respond to that knowledge through my usual M.O. — what room should I clean next? what bad habit must I tackle? what else can I cross off my list? — but that list-making would trap me in the same anxious, harried, time-poor rut I’ve been in for years, and I know that’s not what the present reality requires.

I’ve been on the rollercoaster for a long time, trying desperately to catch up with all the work I think needs doing, watching my to-do list get longer and feeling constantly frustrated at the limited hours in each day, the limited energy I have for the tasks.

I feel a little sick and I’d like to get off now, please.

In true astrology form, this week a little semi-sextile nudged me — one I didn’t even realize was there — and showed me a different way of being, a way that could preserve what is good in the Saturnine South Node and make way for the newness of the Uranian North Node. I’m excited and relieved to finally have some insight into taking myself out of the race with myself. I’ll talk more about that insight tomorrow.

For now, though, I’ve written enough.

P.S. Sorry about the multi-metaphor mash-up. Jeesh!

Photo credits: Carnival ride, fireplace

Saturn Opposition Uranus Reflects Need for Bipartisanship

Kathy — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:28:48 +0000

This week’s Saturn-Uranus opposition marks, not surprisingly, big changes about.

Saturn tends to be old-school, foot-dragging, conservative and cautious while Uranus tends toward more revolutionary, fast-moving, freedom-loving forward movement. An opposition between the two will surely cause some crackling tension in the air as the world holds its breath waiting to see which of these powerful energies will win out.

Clearly, this week’s big winner on the world stage was President-elect Barack Obama (oh, how I love writing that!) and his Uranian mantra Change. The young, insightful, biracial Obama even symbolizes a new generation of energy, thought and perspective in a way that the institutional image of McCain’s Country First campaign just could not. The democratic embrace of people everywhere, of equality and justice for all, of change for the idealistic better, echoed through Obama’s campaign and sustains hope among his supporters.

However, that Saturnine element still lurks — McCain did appeal to 47% of U.S. voters, after all — and so we must not assume that Uranus has “won out” over Saturn. A Saturn ignored is a Saturn that wreaks havoc down the road: It’s the reaper, and we can only reap what we sow. More than anything, I see the Saturn-Uranus opposition as a loud call for bipartisanship going forward. We must build thoughtful, integrated and creative solutions to public problems. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We must figure out ways to bring conservatives into the fold, to use the strengths of both ideologies to better our country.

And so Obama rightly said, in his acceptance speech on Tuesday night:

… to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

McCain foreshadowed these sentiments of healing the divide and supporting one another in his gracious concession earlier that night. The need for Saturnine and Uranian energy is great, both in our personal lives and in the public sphere. We cannot live on hope and change and excitement alone, or we would spin out and burn up like Icarus. We have to take a break, look back, be cautious, conserve what works well — and, yes, jettison what does not. We have to employ both our conservative, cautious, learned side and our idealistic, humanitarian, freedom-loving excitement.

I don’t want to dampen the inspiration of this moment, but because Obama is a wise man — not a brash one — do expect some pulling back on unrealistic campaign promises. It happens every time. It’s okay. The job of a campaign is to set out the stratospheric Uranian/utopian vision. The job of a President is to implement the work in the time and space of hard reality: to employ Saturn in the service of Uranus.

A community organizer should be pretty good at that.

—

* On a personal note, I suffered the loss of my hard drive during this transit, which is why I haven’t posted any new content in over a week: my sincere apologies. Catch-up is forthcoming. But irrepressible Uranus almost immediately saw an opportunity: I no longer have to worry about cleaning out old files to try and make my old machine run smoother. Uranus wiped out all that outdated Saturnine gunk for me! Hooray!

Dammit! The Price of Good Citizenship

Kathy — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:35:44 +0000

I’ve come across two dead crows on my morning walks recently in the Los Angeles foothills. In years past I’d just shudder a bit, step aside and let the faint whiff of flying-rodent death wisp away on the breeze.

But first, these crows didn’t showcase the bloodletting and bodily trauma normally associated with accidental encounters with cars. And second, Alan had informed-slash-reminded me that mysteriously deceased birds in these parts could be indicators of West Nile Virus.

So I regretfully interrupted the obsessive ruminating I love to do on my walks and, instead, repeated to myself, for the last 10 minutes of my walk, the address where lay this morning’s particular dead bird. Neatly decapitated, if you want to know the truth. As if a polite coyote had removed the lid from the tureen to see what kind of soup was inside, then gone on his way when he saw what it was.

When I got home, I Googled, then telephoned, the state’s vector control hotline. The kind lady on the other end took my name, address and phone number, then asked the location of the dead bird, its color, its size, how long it had been there. I could hear the clickety-clack of fingertips on keyboard as I gave her all the information.

Then she said, in a foreboding yet lilting voice, “Would you be willing — ”

And I knew what she was going to say. And I wished I’d given her a different name, address, phone number so I couldn’t be reached when I hung up the phone quickly.

Which I didn’t do. I let her keep talking. ” — to take a double plastic bag — ”

No, no, no, no, no. Dammit. I knew it. It’s not that I’d never seen death before; in fact, Alan once gently reprimanded me for bringing home a dead snake from a walk. It was flat. I thought the patterns were pretty.

” — and return to the location to pick it up?”

I thought, I could say no. What were they going to do?

But I didn’t, because I am a Good Citizen. I got a certificate in sixth grade that said so.

“Ummm…sure,” I said. She gave me further instructions, and I wrote them down, even though my mind was already back at the streetside, the bird — mysteriously — in much gorier condition than when I’d left it.

When I got off the phone, I gathered a rake, a dustpan, thick rubber gloves and — not a double plastic bag, not a triple plastic bag, but, yes, a quadruple plastic bag. I threw my provisions in the back of the truck and drove the half-mile to the bird.

I left the car running and the driver’s side door open because, you know, I might have to make a quick getaway from the dead bird. I worked quickly and quietly, all business. I threw away the rubber gloves when I got home and washed my hands three times in near-scalding water.

And then I went to look at my horoscope. Because that’s what astrologers do: Feeling depressed? What’s up with Saturn in my chart? Feeling confused? What’s got my Neptune? Dead bird on the porch? Check out the 8th house!

Of course, it’s never so simple as all that.

My collaboration with today’s transits (Aries Moon transiting my 8th House in exact opposition to Uranus, sextile Mars in Aquarius in my 6th and semi-sextile Saturn on the MC) might have been less institutional, more impetuous, had I not that looming specter of Saturn perched high atop my natal chart like — well, like a crow screeching from a treetop. Were it not for that Saturn, and a couple other things like, I don’t know, my solid upbringing, I might actually have hung up on the hotline when I had the chance. Or I might have just plucked it up with my bare hands on the spot, tossed it into the nearest trash can and forgotten about it.

What I love about astrology, yet what makes it so frustrating for people who want it to be simple — A plus B must always equal winning the lottery — is that it has room for complexity, diversity and that fearsome wild beast called free will. A Moon-Mars-Uranus ambivalence figure (as the Hubers call it when an opposition, sextile and trine form a triangle) might manifest one way for me, another way for you depending on transits, progressions, other factors in the chart and things like upbringing, environment and beliefs about the self. Which, of course, are all reflected in the chart as well.

So although picking up the dead, possibly virus-infested, bird grossed me out beyond belief, I’m glad — now — that I didn’t hang up on the hotline. When Saturn gets out of balance, it’s so easy to crawl under a rock and give into fear or a sense of inadequacy. And I’ve certainly done that plenty in my life. But Saturn also comes with conscience, and with an awareness of the consequences of one’s actions.

The incidence of West Nile in L.A. County is way up from last year. There are kids in these parts, and other vulnerable folk, who just can’t put up a winning fight against it. I had to figure out a way to do what I had to do to support my conscience, distasteful as it was, instead of my disgust.

Saturn, in the Greek tradition, was called Kronos. That “Kr” element is enough to remember me to karma. Say what you will about nature taking its course — it’s just not good karma to let deadly viruses fester in your neighborhood.

And so there I was, this morning, with the rubber gloves, the quadruple plastic bag and the excessive hand-washing.

Ah! Saturn lives.

Photo credits: Crow, Flag, Telescope