Watching Saturn

Becoming Elderly

Cold hearted orb that rules the night,

Removes the colors from our sight,

Red is gray and yellow white,

But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion.

-Graeme Edge.

On November 15,2024, Saturn will station direct in the sign of Pisces.  I’ve been watching the movement of Saturn with interest for the past year because I am observing my second Saturn Return.  For those of you who might not know, Saturn takes approximately 29.5 years to complete one orbit of The Sun.  Because of this, Saturn returns to the exact place in the Zodiac as it was when we were born just before our 30^th, 60^th, 90^th, and, if we make it that far, 120^th birthday. 

Astrologically, Saturn Returns herald major life transitions.  The first Saturn return finds us firmly in adulthood.  School finished (or nearly so) our career path more or less set, maybe we are getting married, starting families and generally settling into the most productive period of our life on earth.  The second Saturn Return brings thoughts of retirement, we likely have grandchildren and stepping into a role more advisory than executive – or at least should be doing so.  This is the period of life into which I am stepping now.

Saturn Returns are a good time to think about where we have been and what we learned there, what things have served us and what have not, about what we would like to bring with us into the next phase of life and what is best left in the past.  It is a serious season and can be melancholy.  It can also be a time of reevaluation and reinvention. 

Saturn is a planet of toil, discipline, maturity and limitation.  His lessons are often hard, both intellectually and emotionally.  It can be difficult to say goodbye to attitudes and occupations that we have become strongly identified with and to accept new, untested roles in our families, communities and the larger world.  Saturn teaches us to endure through change and develop the wisdom that comes from deciding which hill to surrender and which we are willing to die on.  That there are things we can only learn over a long time. 

Through journaling and revisiting old memories, I have been trying to take advantage of the opportunities for growth that this Saturn Return is bringing me.  It’s been an interesting process.  There are habits of thought and ingrained behavior patterns that I know I wish to leave behind, character traits I would like to develop.  I’ve made a few positive steps, quit smoking, trying to be more diligent in my meditation practice, going to the gym, beginning a formal study of astrology.  I can feel the person I have been for the past three decades beginning to loosen his grip on the levers of my life but the person I will become as an “old man” (Age is a signature of Saturn) is still a stranger to me.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of him, or my idea of who I hope he is.  But one thing that distinguishes the second Saturn Return from the first, at least for me, is that, as a young adult, everything encourages us to choose a role, put on the costume of that role and “fake it till you make it”.  By contrast, the role of “elder”, especially in our culture, is one of impotence and dotage, and worse, irrelevance. 

To avoid playing this role, our culture encourages us to defer and deny elderhood.  Much of what is wrong with our culture arises from this deferral and denial.  I am trying to avoid contributing to these problems by attempting to embrace a change of perspective that elderhood can bring, if we let it.  But how exactly DO we let it?

My second Saturn Return happens to coincide with what appears to be major political and cultural realignments here in the US and many other countries.  Whether one welcomes these changes or views them with dread, it seems certain that long-held assumptions about our cultural and political future will be challenged if not discredited in the next few decades.  These changes have been predicted since at least the 90s by thinkers like Neil Howe and William Strauss as part of a historical “turning”.  Astrologers seem to agree, pointing to events like the United States Pluto Return.  But one needn’t be a widely read cultural theorist nor an astrologer to understand at a deep intuitive level that change is the only constant.  We know this and yet when sweeping change comes it is almost always met with surprise.

I was born in 1965 and spent the first ten years of my life living in a racially diverse (and tense) public housing project in the shadow of two massive oil refineries during a time of great social change and upheaval.  My parents were caught up in the counterculture of that time and my grandparents were decidedly NOT.  As a sensitive and precocious child, I caught the vibe of the time.  Most of the aesthetic, cultural, political and spiritual values I hold today were formed in that weird little crucible in South Philadelphia.

All of us, no matter what our views on the ostensibly important issues of the day, view them through lenses ground and polished by specific historical and biographical circumstances.  No matter how self-aware we might be, few of us recognize the contingent nature of our experience.  As we age, the world around us changes but our ideas about it remain largely the same.  If these ideas undergo any radical transformations, these will usually be the result of some traumatic or disruptive experience that forces us to take a different perspective which will, in time, become as rigid as the one we held before.  This can’t be helped.  To act in a deliberate manner, we must make some assumptions about how the world works – to take a step with confidence I must assume the earth will bear this step.   By the same token, things often look different in the light of day than they do by Moon Light.

Change is the rule, and this rule does not change.  I’ve always known this.  When I was young, I believed that most of the world’s problems arose from resistance to change.  I found confirmation of this belief in Taoist philosophy and especially in The I Ching.  In many ways I still believe this.  What has changed is my belief that there is a way that things SHOULD be – there are only ways that they CAN (or cannot) be. 

I mentioned the United States Pluto return earlier.  This is only one of a number of astrological transits that suggest major changes to large institutional structures.  Such transits say little about what these transformations will look like and nothing about what they SHOULD.  Openings exist that might be leveraged to bring about massive and sweeping change, but the changes the ultimately arrive might be as much a result of the failure of those who seek to bring them about – unintended consequences are still consequential.

Like anyone else, I have my hopes and fears about where we might end up in the coming decades.  But I also realize that I have fewer decades left than I have experienced already.  Maybe my grand children’s children will like the world they will inherit, maybe they will hate it and be powerful enough to do something about it.  Maybe their efforts will be the real fruits of the transits we are under now.  Maybe their children and grandchildren won’t like the world that they create and, when the stars favor it, will turn that world again.  What ever happens on that day, the only influence I will have upon the direction events take is the memory (if any) that I will leave with them.

I hope to be the kind of elder that knows how to stay in his lane.  Things change and we can become too stuck in our ways to notice.  There are also things that never change - change itself, the course of the stars, the striving of all beings to make the world they hope for – but you have to have been around long enough to see these things NOT change to know that they do not.  This is the ONLY way to truly know so there is no reason or profit in preaching to the young about things that only the old can know.  Elders do well to let the young find out for themselves what endures.  Meanwhile, I will watch the stars and count the cards and share what wisdom (if any) I have gained when asked.  This is the kind of old man I hope to be.