a saturn return +
Glad it’s not mine. Yay that it’s the other guy’s.
Hogwash, you say? More’s the pity when everything jibes. Or is jiving. Or is just right there, dripping wet on the deck.
Saturn is returning to Aries. So Aries, get buckled in.
A Saturn return is long. Roughly two or three years long, in fact, which seems like a pretty excessive amount of time for a planet to make a point. But then, Saturn has never struck me as being particularly interested in making a quick point. You’re making choices, making decisions, building things, changing things, avoiding things, committing to things, and generally getting on with your life. And then Saturn comes back around. Which means all those choices and decisions you made along the way are now coming to call.
And Saturn has an inconvenient way of making sure you answer the door.
Funny the way a planet enters your 12th House and the chips and dip are fresh, the beverages are chilled or smoked and ready to be raised to your mouth. Time to party! Time to bring your new friend out in the wide open, and introduce the new pal all around. Putting off writing those checks? Better prep up.
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A Saturn return brings the consequences of your own decisions back into the room and asks you to deal with them. Not the intentions behind the decisions. Not the circumstances surrounding them. Not the convenient explanation for why things turned out the way they did.
The results.
This is where accountability comes in. A Saturn return to its natal position puts you face-to-face with the life your own choices have produced. You may not have intended every outcome. Obviously. Not everything that happens in a life is within your control.
But Saturn is interested in the part that was.
The decisions you made. The things you didn’t decide. The things you caused to happen. The things you decided had to be the way they were. The things you decided for other people. The structures you built. And the ones you failed to maintain. And there isn’t much use looking around for somewhere else to put that.
A Saturn return is also rather good at separating perception from reality.
We all have our explanations. We decide what things mean. We decide what other people mean. We decide why something happened, what somebody intended, what we deserve, what will eventually happen, and how the whole thing fits together. And after enough time, it can get a little difficult to tell where your interpretation ends and the facts begin. Take a look- Saturn is there, one foot over the threshold.
Well, hello there!
Suddenly for an Aries, the explanation has to sit next to the evidence. If your perception doesn’t line up with reality, a Saturn return has a way of making that difficult to ignore. Not because Saturn is interested in proving you wrong. He isn’t your seventh-grade math teacher. He simply has no particular obligation to agree with your interpretation of what happened. That’s what makes a Saturn return interesting. Saturn isn’t especially interested in your preferred version of reality. He is interested in what actually exists. A Saturn return puts the story next to the facts and leaves them sitting there together.
What did you build? What’s working? What’s not? What’s sustainable? What’s costing you more than you realized? What have you been putting off? And, perhaps most irritatingly, what part of all of this belongs to you?
Aries, Saturn isn’t especially interested in whether you had a perfectly good reason for doing something, either. The Saturn return isn’t really about explaining the past. You had your reasons. Fine. Saturn is looking at what those reasons produced. And that can mean responsibility, limitations, endings, changes in work, money, health, family, priorities, ambitions, or simply the way you understand your own life. The particular subject varies. The principle doesn’t.
You are the person who has to live with the accumulated result of your choices. A Saturn return has a way of making that fact considerably harder to overlook. It also has a way of exposing anything that has been held together by postponement. You can avoid a decision for years. You can tell yourself there is still time. You can wait for circumstances to change, for somebody else to change, for the right opportunity to appear. Saturn is patient. But the clock is still running. Not the most comfortable for an Aries.
Not choosing isn’t neutral. Not deciding doesn’t stop the clock. And eventually, the consequences of leaving something unresolved belong to the person who left it unresolved. That’s the bluntness of a Saturn return. After twenty-eight or twenty-nine years, Saturn shows up, with his meaningful stare. He’s got purpose. He’s in the house. Not to punish you. Not to congratulate you. To see what you’ve done with the choices you’ve been given. And if something doesn’t hold up, you don’t get to blame the inventory.
You get to decide what you’re going to do about it, Saturn won’t interfere. But- well- Aries-
Eventually, reality gets a vote.
all photos + my little jetty + bal harbour + in good tides and stinky tides