#17: A detour into my own crazy and my own chart.
welcome, captive audience, take a seat.
Upcoming Astrology:
There are plenty of week ahead resources out there (the CHANI podcast is a good one), so I thought it might be more fun to read a focused interpretation of one dynamic in the sky.
Specific astro dynamic: Venus moves into Virgo on Monday, October 9. How lovely for our Virgo friends!
Whatever part of your chart has Virgo over it will hopefully be feeling some more sweetness and ease. It’s not the happiest place in the chart for Venus (she’s in fall in Virgo, aka she doesn’t like the vibe), but that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to appreciate the Virgoan in a Venusian way.
Make yourself a bouquet of dried flowers, bake something for someone you like, give yourself a very loving gift and deep clean your house in preparation for the shortening days. A big part of Virgo is getting shit done and sometimes that can be an act of love!
My own chart and my own crazy-making aspects and feeling very tired.
I had an idea of what I’d write this week, a longerish reflection on the Virgo-Pisces axis, but instead that’s happening next week. This week I’m going to use my captive audience (you) to reflect on the specific version of crazy I’m feeling at the moment and look at my own natal chart. Obviously, I know what’s going on in my life that’s crazy making right now, but one of the great gifts of astrology is getting to look outside of my little life for cycles of context. A different way to think about the same thing.
So, here’s my chart (the center wheel) and the current transits (the outer wheel):
A few things are, to me, loudest here. There are two main relationships that are playing out: (1) the North Node sitting exactly on my Ascendant (meaning implicitly that the South Node is on my Descendant) and (2) the square from Saturn in Pisces to my sweet little Gemini Moon. These are two pretty big womp womp dynamics. That’s the technical term.
I thought I had already talked about the nodes more when I first wrote a little about eclipses earlier this year, but I guess not. Basically, the North and South Node are the places in the sky where eclipses take place in a given year. You find them at the place where the apparent path of the Sun and the path of the Moon meet up. Demetra George has an excellent section about this in her book Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice: A Manual of Traditional Techniques, Volume I: Assessing Planetary Condition, which is where I pulled this image from:
The North Node is traditionally associated with the head of a dragon while the South Node is associated with the dragon’s tail. A lot of the symbolism and metaphor for their use in astrology comes from this. You can basically expect intensity, acquisition, and big appetite wherever the North Node is in your chart, while you can expect loss, emptiness, and release wherever the South Node is.
Vedic astrology has a whole tradition around the nodes that I haven’t ever studied, and modern astrology has picked pieces from that Vedic tradition and highlighted some ideas of karma and lifecycles. The Vedic history is interesting, but not something I know enough about to do justice explaining. As for the absorption of it into modern Western astrology…. it feels a little icky and detached to me! But follow your bliss.
For my purposes, I’m seeing this perfect alignment between the North Node and my Ascendant and going to say that it makes sense I’m feeling overwhelmed! I can contextualize the welling up and crazy-making jitteriness to this piece of the astrological weather. Lucky for me, it’ll stay exactly there until about December 1. Plenty of time to get used to feeling crazy.
The next fun dynamic is that square from Saturn. In the way back tradition, a superior square from Saturn in the Twelfth to the Moon in the Third could mean disaster for me from my siblings or my community (represented by the Third House), with mental wellness or imprisonment (represented by the Twelfth House), with my physical health (the Moon is the body), or with an elephant (Twelfth House also means big animals). I’ll be watching for these things, I guess, but I can also give it a slightly more modern take with more modern concerns. This Saturn/Moon dynamic can be a reminder to be mindful of my routines and standards for my health, my home, and my energy. Always so helpful to think about, always hard to enact.
From a modern perspective, squares are tension aspects. They usually mean some kind of challenge that has to be encountered, maneuvered, and released. Hard stuff that sucks to go through but you just kind of… go through it. This is in comparison to an opposition which you also have to go through but is more like a collision, something that doesn’t resolve in the same sense. Consequences of squares might heal back stronger, while consequences of oppositions might just make things different. And in either case you obviously don’t know where you’ll end up with regard to the experience, how long it’ll take to get through or how long it’ll stick with you.
I’ll be seeing this square in the sky pretty directly until about February. I’m also just a little over two months into living in a new place, building up my community, and creating a space I enjoy living in. I can see how I need to be extra aware of when it’s necessary to get out of a comfort zone and spend my energy on something and when it’s fine to not. Adding in the North Node in my First House, it makes a lot of sense to feel inner tension around expending and conserving energy. Another thing this dynamic makes me think about, which is helpful, I hadn’t verbalized to myself this way, is that sometimes that energy conservation doesn’t mean spending time alone.
Saturn in the Twelfth very much evokes an isolation fear. At the same time, the Moon in the Third is a classic configuration of locality and immediate community. Not exactly your social circle, but the familiar strangers you see when you get comfortable and routine in your daily excursions. I can have the impulse to avoid those interactions, choosing self checkout, ordering food, sitting quietly in a Lyft, if I’m not careful. It’s good to remember the benefit of unplanned, short-term interactions.
Ultimately, I know what’s making me feel nuts right now, and whether or not it was foretold in the sky doesn’t really matter. There’s only so much one can control (and it’s not a lot), so I’m working on not throwing endless energy at things that aren’t mine. Internal boundaries yada yada (Another great representation of that Saturn-Moon square 🤪).
Thanks for reading this today! It’s a little different from what I normally do. I doubt I’ll go off my own chart very often, but it was useful for me today. If you have any interest in talking about your chart and the things happening in the sky, let me know! I’d love to get together and chat, I’m always learning and would love to learn from you how things have played out in your life.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.