Star Struck Style

I’m not quite sixty yet, but I was just pondering the relationship between my sixtieth year on this planet and the often disparate traditions of Western and Chinese astrology.

In the former tradition, the sixtieth year is a return to the beginning of the sixty-year cycle that began in the year that you were born. It is the year of the Wood Snake, and I am a Wood Snake in Chinese astrology. In Western astrology, the time leading up to the sixtieth birthday marks the first major aspect that the progressed sun makes to the natal sun. On the heels of the Saturn return (which occurs when an individual is fifty-eight or fifty-nine), it is a time of comfort, when knowing oneself seems easier than ever before. A sense of realism and self-acceptance becomes de rigueur if other cosmic factors don’t get in the way.

For that reason, I believe that I’m on the right path when I say that I need to shed my skin so that I can live a life that is more in-tune with who I am. I am so bored at my place of work that doing almost anything else seems appealing at the moment.

While my desire to change my career trajectory may seem at odds with the notion of “comfort,” being comfortable in my own skin means that I need to stop pretending that the job I’m doing satisfies me intellectually, physically or spiritually. It doesn’t. I need to move on. I need find somewhere to work where I can be a more-authentic version of myself: the Capricorn/Wood Snake that I know I am.

Of course, this is all happening to me while both Uranus and Mars are forming harmonious aspects with my midheaven, making me realize that that component of my chart has as much to do with self-realization as it does with my sense of ambition. Nevertheless, I don’t ever remember feeling like this before. I hope that the rest of my sixtieth year is going to be like this. If anyone had told me years ago that I would be slithering toward a personal breakthrough at my age, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Are any of you other snakes feeling this way? Let me know in the comments section or on one of my social media pages.