Star Struck Style

I’m in the thick of my second Saturn return right now. The ringed-planet is currently making a retrograde pass overtop my natal Saturn. The aspect is exact sometime around the first couple days of November, and then again around the last couple days of November. Saturn’s station mid-month is about eight minutes away from the degree Saturn inhabited on the day I was born.

My astro.com horoscope for this astrological event is entitled “Pruning Your Life.” It describes the conjunction as follows:

“This is one of the most important times in your life. A major cycle of experience is closing, and great changes are about to take place. How great these changes are depends largely on what you have been doing with your life over the past several years. Have you been living as you feel you should or as you think others want you to? If you have been doing the latter, this influence will have a greater impact.

This influence occurs about every twenty-nine years. The first such influence occurred when you were about twenty-nine, and the second is now, between your fifty-eighth and sixtieth birthday.

Last year, many aspects of your life have begun to change. Relationships may have changed, and you may have changed your residence or your job; you have been dominated by an urgent feeling that if you don’t do everything you have always wanted to do, you will never have another chance. And now, at about fifty-eight, you will feel that a substantial portion of your life has passed and that you had better get on with making it all work. If your relationship is unsatisfactory but you have been making the best of it, you will examine that relationship even more thoroughly now and may decide to end it. Certainly you will have to change it substantially. The same is true of any other aspect of your life that you have tolerated but not found very rewarding.

Consciously or unconsciously, you are pruning your life of everything that is not relevant to what you really are as a human being. If this process is not happening consciously, you may experience a sense of loss for the elements of your life that are coming to an end now. However, do not dwell upon these losses, for they are necessary in order to clear the decks for the major period of action in your life.

This is a time of endings and new beginnings. If you have built your life up to now around activities that are inappropriate for you, it will be a period of crisis. If you have been doing what you should in previous years, this influence will simply mark a time of solidification and the beginning of new phases of activity.”

As a Capricorn, I’m not looking at this alignment as something oppressive that I need to be worried about. However, I do feel “suppressed” rather than “oppressed” lately. It’s hard for me to be enthusiastic about anything right now, and yet I feel that enthusiasm simmering beneath the surface. Yet something inside me is telling me that playing a waiting game right now is the right choice for me to make. With Pluto making its last stand in Capricorn, I’ve also got the big changes in the world around me on my mind, and Saturn returns to direct motion just a few days before Pluto makes its move into Aquarius.

For those reasons, I’m not feeling the urge to “prune” my life right now. In fact, I feel like I need to play this waiting game for a few more weeks. I’m a gardener, and I know that the art of pruning many of the plants in my garden is based upon perfect timing. You look for something specific like new growth emerging from a stem before you make a cut. The plants give you a sign when it’s time to put in the work. I don’t believe that the universe is going to give me that sign for a few more weeks.

Nevertheless, I believe that it is going to happen. Just this morning, for instance, I got a targeted ad on social media for a 200 hour yoga instructor course taught by someone that I used to work with several years ago. The studio is within walking distance from my house, and now they have started offering scholarships to deserving individuals. Perhaps that is one of those signs from the universe that I’ve been waiting for. Maybe that is one of those “new beginnings” my astro.com horoscope has predicted since I’ve wanted to become a yoga instructor for several years now. I’ve already resolved to look into the program, but I am going to wait until December because that’s what the stars are telling me to do. The “urgent feeling” described in the passage above isn’t going to get me anywhere. If nothing else, Saturn has taught me patience and has trained me to wait for the right moment — just like gardening has taught me the same things.

I do believe that the right moment is near. I just need to wait another month or so. I’ve got all the tools to move into this new era of my life, but I need to wait for the planets to sort themselves out first.

Soon . . .