Mary O'Gara

Posts Tagged ‘Saturn’

Saturn’s dipping back into Virgo, so the time is right to restructure your plans and goals, revise your manuscripts, and revision your future.   If it needs adjusting, Saturn retrograde in Virgo is the time for easy adjustments.

Saturn is not only structure, but also accountability, so checking each and every plan and plot you have is a good thing right now.   Look for acocuntability–and make changes or eliminate goals and projects for which you’re no longer willing to be accountable.   Revise plots with structure in mine; sure you can keep those crazy characters, but you have to decide when the reader will know what they’re doing.

As for revisioning your future–just weed out those goals you wouldn’t be willing to have manifest right this second.   And take at least one step toward the ones you keep even if that’s a minor step like a phone call, a blog, or a note in your day planner.

Saturn’s retrograde until the end of May.  It hangs around its station degree and minute from May 27 to June 2nd, so get your work done before then.

You won’t be done, of course.   After Saturn goes direct, you can still polish that structure and shine up the dream, reworking them happily until Saturn goes into Libra again on July 23rd.

You goals for Saturn in Libra:  Be ready to recognized great critique partners and other team players to help you reach your goals.   Sadly, you may also need more distance from some of your present colleagues.

When clients meet with an astrologer for a reading, what the client usually wants (or thinks she wants) are answers.  While there’s a science to astrology that lets astrologers predict accurately the hours the Moon will be void or the duration of Saturn in Libra, answers are only the tip of the iceberg of the art of astrology.

Astrology is also a language and a powerful mnemonic device, a way of categorizing and reducing everything in the human’s universe to symbols that can be manipulated and discussed.   The questions astrological patterns raise are truly more significant than the answers.

Here are questions worth asking about significant relationships (both personal and professional) now:

1.  Is this relationship vital and fulfilling for both of parties?

2.  What’s right about the relationship?

3.  What would make it even better?

4.  And, after asking the first questions, sometimes it is important to ask, Would we both be better if we put this relationship on hold, either temporarily or permanently?

Use the questions and your journal for a little serious study.   Ask the question more than once and check out the answer with your personal experience, with people who observe the relationship and with the other party.   Dig deeply and make changes carefully.  Remember Saturn brings concentration and focus as well as boundaries and endings.

The North Node stretches us, leads (or pushes us into personal growth) and Saturn is the cold-blooded reality principle that makes us deal with the physical world around us.   Saturn is symbolically Father Time and the rower across the River Styx.  But above all Saturn teaches the way an archeologist explores a site–tearing apart what’s not salvageable and then restoring what can be saved for another era.

When the North Node pulls and Saturn pushes, we humans are uncomfortable.  All last week people saw treasured plans falling apart, had to repair things they didn’t break, and faced qualities in themselves they didn’t like.  The key was, we humans were not happy but we also were not in denial.   The North Node jolts us out of complacent sleep.

So how do we use these days?   One key with Saturn is always goal setting, in writing or on the computer, but at the level of strategic planning.  Tasks lists are useful; daydreams and mental notes don’t help at all.  Time management is such a Saturnine quality that just listing a project on a calendar and giving it due time will often bring perspective and solutions.

If you follow the mean nodes, it looks as if this aspect has passed; you’ll need to follow it with software showing the true nodes to see its impact in your own life.  You’re growing in the house or area where the North Node is transiting through Capricorn and dealing with reality and finite resources where Saturn is moving through Virgo.

It’s a little like boot camp.  It’ stretches you the way intense physical exercise stretches muscles.  And it’s only uncomfortable during the adjustment period.

Saturn is moving so slowly this year…and it’s transits last a long, long time.   I’ll be writing more about Saturn in my New Moon (astrology) newsletter this week…but it’s a slow, slow year for the old taskmaster.  Fortunately for me, Saturn is finally moving away from its conjunction to my Neptune, and I’m ready to get out and play in the world again.

What’s the good side of Saturn?  I’ve just had the exhausting side, but I am the one who insists every aspect has its silver lining.  As Carl Jung would say, if you’ve have the negative, it owes you the positive.

And the good side of Saturn is focus and structure.  My fiction gets more structured during Saturn transits, and I even consider becomeing a plotter :::shudder:::   I’ve been reading Break into Fiction by Mary Buckham and Dianna Love, happy to find I can have story structure and not have to be a total plotter.  Love the templates–and the explanations for how and why they work.

All that focus and structure thinking has made me look at my journal differently, so my September workshop on the journaling for working writers will have new material on using a journal to support the structure of your story and to keep  yourself on track.   Less on nurturing, more on being the creative person you want to be.

Saturn’s gift.  Which, of course, I can only recognize now it’s losing its grip on me.   And a big smile over that loosening grip.