Eating your kids teaches you a lot about consequences.
why is saturn beating up on me smh
Pluto is back in Aquarius. Welcome back to the people’s sign, Pluto! I am excited to settle into whatever this era brings now that he’s fully out of Capricorn and won’t be moving into Pisces until 2043.
Here are two books I’m reading at the moment that feel appropriate, if you’d like to book club it. Both get at Pluto thoughts in an Aquarius way, I think.
Wounds and what to do with them.
You’re not supposed to write from your wounds. You’re supposed to write only from your scars.
This is an idea that Melissa Febos talks about in her book Body Work. She threads the needle and effectively makes the case for speaking from your experience, from your traumas, and not letting that practice become exploitative. For those of us who lived through the self-excavating blogs of 2014, it’s not an easy argument to win. How many times did you read a story on a venture funded blog about the worst thing that ever happened to someone? I was always left wondering, Was it worth $1,200?
The utility of speaking from your scars is also a foundational belief in certain Southern Christian environments where children are taught to use their pain to evangelize. Find the pain that speaks to others, but not pain so fresh that you can’t effectively talk through it, can’t effectively preach through it. In both Melissa Febos’s book and in youth groups across the country, the sentiment is that violation is fruitful territory for meaningful connection, but you have to be careful not to let it get away from you. Our violations, covered up by scar tissue, give our testimony weight.
And then there’s Jesus. He didn’t wait any time at all before he told Thomas to reach into the gaping hole in his side carved out with a Roman’s spear. He must have still been bleeding when he pressed his warm palm against those of his disciples. I’m foggy on the scripture (Catholics, at least the ones I know, are not as obsessive about memorizing verses -- how many times will I say this before I stop disclaiming?), but I know Jesus was doing his best to get the word out quickly, as soon as the rock rolled away from his tomb. No time to wait for a dying (dead?) body to heal before he showed off his own violations to his disciples.
I’m in a place in my Saturn return that I knew would come, but that I was not expecting to feel exactly this way. Bruised and so fucking tired. I have known about my Saturn return, known it was coming, for about a decade. I knew about it before I’d gotten into astrology, before I understood it at all, because I have been online for many years. I knew a little more about it once I started reading Hellenistic astrological texts translated by Ben Dykes, once I started listening to multiple hour-long podcasts, and once I started trying to make things make sense in my own chart. I’d heard enough from older friends and teachers to know that “big things” happen during the Saturn return.
Saturn is famous for eating his children, because he was told they would ultimately overthrow him. Then, having fought his fate, Saturn’s wife tricked him into eating a stone wrapped up in cotton gauze instead of his final son. He mistook action and impact. He mistook intent and consequence. Before long, that son, Jupiter, deposed Saturn. Jupiter forced him to vomit up the rest of the children, dethroned him, and shipped him off to Italy. Things have a funny way of working out.
So what is Saturn to you? What does Saturn want? Who is Saturn?
Heavy. Loud on the inside. Steel. Iron, also. Closed doors and windows painted shut. The most wrinkled hands you’ve ever seen, gripping hard. Minimum wage and also the richest person you can imagine. The outcome. Commitment and the consequences of it. People start dying, people start sticking around. You get carried away, you get lost in the habitual. Questions start to find their answers. Needing to go turns into needing to get all the way away. We start to find our endings before we realize we were ready.
In The IC: An Astrology of Coming Home, Pallas K Augustine talks about the cohort of astrologers who came of age under a dignified Saturn. These are the people born 1988-1993 whose Saturn is in Capricorn and Aquarius. Augustine is getting at an idea that is really interesting to me that I haven’t considered or seen written about much elsewhere—as much as we’ve all been a part of this time that Saturn has been in his home signs, that group of people have Saturn in dignity. They have Saturn at home, secure. Old souls living in times overwhelmed by ideologues. Those of us with Saturn in Pisces are the first cohort in almost six years with a less dignified Saturn. Soggy Saturn, slippery Saturn. The judge inside you took an edible and is pretty sure he (he) is having a heart attack, but he’s not.
Scar tissue is Saturnian as much as the initial wound is Martial. Saturn is bones and the things that keep our body structured. The giant knot of wood that a tree grows around its damaged parts to enclose them, keep it protected and stronger than before. Saturn is what happens when the wound has closed.
I am not feeling scarred at the moment, I am feeling the bruised and bloody parts right now. I don’t want to postpone writing about it until there are scars to show. Not to compare myself to Jesus, but I feel an urgency to get moving. I want to walk around the world, bloody palms outstretched. Or maybe it just feels like that’s the only option anyway, that the bloody palms are part and parcel with being alive. Waiting for the scars to harden means you’re waiting for a very long time, by which point you’ll have new bloody parts.
Since Saturn entered Pisces on March 7, 2023, so much in my life has been upended or irrevocably altered. A cross country move, deaths of important people, the ending of a friendship that had soured so slowly I didn’t realize it until it was way too late, reckoning with a genocide perpetrated with my tax dollars, and a wonderful new niece who has been a bright spot in this field of conflict and confusion. At this point, with a little less than a year total left of Saturn in Pisces, I’m feeling appreciation for the ways the bruised and bloody parts of me are continuing to operate. We are not waiting for scars. There is a lot you can still do, hurting, and a lot to be learned from the things that leave a mark.
On some kind of livestream or Instagram post I heard Diana Rose Harper talk about the idea that you have your Saturn return and then you have to wait until your first Saturn sextile to really integrate the lessons. This makes logical sense. The wound is your Saturn return and it takes about six years to heal. I would love it if it weren’t the case, but I think it has taken me about six years to move “past” any great life change I’ve experienced. And, honestly, that healing will continue on for many years following. At some point you just call it living.
Thank you for reading these winding thoughts. Let me know what you think in the comments or by responding to my email. Appreciate you endlessly.
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.