First of all, an apology to all my regular readers. As Saturn in Sagittarius rolls into the exact conjunction with my natal Mercury, sometimes it gets difficult to write. Also: the rest of my life has been nothing to write home about, but that’s a little too personal.
This brings me to the main point I want to make today about interpreting astrological transits, using Saturn in Sagittarius as a specific example.
They say writers should write what they know about. On the one hand this is fairly good advice, but on the other hand it’s patent nonsense. If that were the case, every book you’d read and movie you’d see would be about some wretch in his or her sweatpants swearing at a keyboard about how bad it pays to be a writer. It might have the virtue of being True, but no one in their right mind is going to make it $200 million movie about that, unless you throw in a bunch of teenage vampires that transform into giant robots, or whatever’s selling these days.
Likewise an astrologer, or someone who writes about astrology, needs to draw upon their own experience with life but can’t let that dictate everything. “When I had my last Saturn opposition, my nephew sprained his ankle in a freak bowling accident, so that’s going to happen to your nephew too” is not a prediction I would ever want to make in a reading.
I am now old enough to have been an adult the last time Saturn passed through Sagittarius (November 1985-November 1988), and I’m like other transits I’ve experienced before, I find my judgment about it is perhaps a little too personalized. If you been reading my work for a while you know I’m not the type to automatically be discouraged by a difficult transit. I’m not one of those people who goes around blaming everything on Mercury being in retrograde, despite the fact that it’s really easy to do that some days. Still: just like in early 1986, I hit a wall recently.
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It has been extremely rare for me over the course of my adult life time to actually schedule a vacation, or even a couple of days off. I tend to keep working and working and working until I break down and stop functioning normally and stare into a corner and bump my head there for two or three weeks at a time like a malfunctioning Roomba.
These are the days of my life.
That’s more or less what I’ve been doing the last three weeks, but like a proper vacation, I think I’ve gotten some psychological use out of it… even if my head is a little bruised from it all.
Saturn in Sagittarius is a particularly difficult placement for me, and not just because I’m a Sagittarius by birth. Over the course of the next three years Saturn will beat conjunct my Mercury and South Node, square my Saturn, square my Uranus and Pluto, conjunct my Sun, and opposite my Jupiter. If you were thinking “that sounds like three years of a lot of difficulty,” then congratulations: you know your astrology.
At the same time, there’s a certain comfort in knowing I’ve been through this particular transit for. I can look back to the mid-1980s and assure myself that I am, in a likelihood, much more mature and much less stupid about my life and I was then. We’ll see, won’t we?
The important thing from my perspective, as far as you’re concerned anyway dear reader, is that all this life experience has made me a better astrologer, and much better at accurately predicting what will come for my clients. And when you get right down to it: I survived my bad crap before, and I’m willing to bet you will too. That, and it also serves as a reminder that lawyers should NOT defend themselves in court and surgeons should NOT try to take out their own appendix –astrologers have as hard a time being objective about themselves as anyone else. I made it through Saturn in Sagittarius last time, and I plan to do so this time.
So if you’re old enough to recall November 1985-November 1988 (or August 2000-June 2003 when Saturn was in Gemini and would have had similar effects), look back at those times and see what you can learn from them… but don’t fear, don’t panic, and don’t let it get you down. And if you want a reading to talk about it, drop me a line, okay?
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