As I approached this blog I thought about the upheaval in Egypt, the San Francisco plane crash, the Quebec train crash, the gruesome soccer match in Brazil, Andy Murray’s win at Wimbledon — no lack of remarkable events.
But on Sunday — with Jupiter and retrograde Mercury in Cancer and the dark of the Moon with both luminaries in Cancer and also Saturn’s stationing direct in Scorpio — I was feeling a bit moody and decided to just wait and listen for a theme to write about.
Melanie Reinhart was the first person I heard use the term “metalog” to describe the phenomena of “that which we are speaking about is also arising.” In the transparent world we astrologers often inhabit, this is something that happens naturally and often – that which we are attending to makes an appearance.
So, I was thinking about Saturn’s station when I got a call from someone in NYC (who also happens to be getting to the last pass of the first Saturn return). Saturday (Saturn’s day) had been a big disappointment — a job he had seriously been counting on fell through.
On Sunday he was on a day trip from lower Manhattan to somewhere outside the city to escape to a friend’s swimming pool on a gorgeous summer day. He left the apartment with barely enough time to take the subway to Penn Station, to catch the train to have an afternoon away from the immediate confines of the city.
The subway that happened by first was not an express, but the much slower local, stopping at every stop. He methodically recounted the name of each station to me on the phone. It took forever, but he did get there just in time to catch the train to a sunny afternoon.
What a perfectly literal Saturn station conversation. And yesterday the transiting Moon was applying to oppose Pluto and square Uranus. The urgency to get away, to get free of something, to break out is a familiar sensation these days. But Saturn’s station is like the local train…we go slowly, no stop can be overlooked, no shortcuts taken. We may feel frustrated by the pace with so much of importance to attend to, but when we respect the unfolding of time, events proceed properly.
The Theosophists and Alan Leo spoke of Saturn as character building. In Scorpio our character is formed in the dark tunnels of subjectivity and in the magnetizing power of our attachments and desires. Emotional insight, coming to understand a deeper reality, comes from staying right on the edge of intensity – this is one of Scorpio’s gift.
Saturn may keep us waiting; patience and restraint are the ingredients in the current emotional caldrons.
Saturn inclines towards solitude and loneliness, but we won’t stay there. It’s a temporary and ever-fluid state — Saturn is moving directly, gloriously, towards Jupiter in Cancer and Neptune in Pisces. (Saturn trines Jupiter precisely on July 17 and Neptune on the 19th.)
Saturn brings the humility to accept the restraints and limitations in our experience. We can bypass the ubiquitous seductions of our culture — no one has everything they want; every one of us has a portal of emptiness and isolation inside which a deeper fulfillment and meaning may actually dwell. Saturn rewards the yogis and ascetics, as well as the builders and architects.
The water signs are mute. All are connected to the occult, the hidden aspects of our experience and the matrix that gives birth to form.
There is creative and gentle magic in the air these days with the generosity of water signs lining up in ongoing harmonious configurations.
With Cancer we are carried further on the timeless journey home – home to wherever we feel safe and to whatever feeds body and soul. A Cancer theme is our remembrance of the past and our yearning to belong.
Cancer is the beginnings of life, the myths and realities of our origins; Scorpio brings constant death and resurrection and Pisces pulls us away from the material and into the poetry of the soul life.
The water trilogy, shining from above, show that fullness and emptiness, the exquisite and the brutal, the soft and the firm, are all part of the wholeness of life from which we never can be separate.
We may not know where we are going but we know we will get there.
Happy Cancer New Moon week, everyone!