Happy Returns
Above or Inside
Hello Friends,
In astrology, a birth chart is a mapping of the symbolic location of the planets in the sky at the moment of a person’s birth. It’s a snapshot of the heavens as seen from little baby you crashing into this world.
When a person says that they are a Pisces, they are talking about their Sun sign, or the location of the Sun relative to the Earth’s orbit. In other words, because I was born in late February, the sun in my chart appears in the sign of Pisces (a patch of sky loosely associated with the constellation Pisces).
All the other planets that orbit around the Sun also have positions in my birth chart that represent where they were in the sky relative to Earth.
If someone were to turn away from the joyous event of my birth and look at the sky, they would see the Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn also in the sign of Pisces. The other planets appear in other signs on my chart.
Every year on my birthday, I can observe the Sun in the position it is on my astrology birth chart. This is because it takes 1 year for our Earth to move around the Sun.
It takes Mercury about 88 days to get back to the place it was when I was born. A Mars round-trip is a little over 2 years. And Saturn can take anywhere between 28 and 32 years.
The further the planet is away from the Sun, the longer the time between returns. You will never experience a Pluto return, as it takes around 250 years. Jupiter does it in 12.
Returns in a birth chart are significant events in astrology. The energy that they bring is considerable; a person experiences a metaphorical rebirth of that planet’s energy.
In Western astrology, the planet Saturn is symbolic of the Father (the king of the gods in mythology), and consequently rules order, limitations, and commitments. Saturn’s role in your chart is to remind you how to get things done, the systems that you use to make meaning.
A Saturn Return is like coming home late from a party in high school where your dad has waited up to smell your breath and either tuck you in to bed with a kiss on your forehead or give you a lecture and ground you. It gives you an opportunity to see how you have been living your life and really investigate if you are serving your highest self.
A person, if they are lucky, will experience 3 Saturn Returns, one approximately every 3 decades—at the ages of around 30, 60, and 90. In your chart, Saturn is a big, slow-moving planet, so you have a few years to do this work. While Saturn returns on a single date, the effect of its return lasts for years, because the Earth moves, too.
By the end of my first Saturn Return, I had sold everything, left a quiet life in Atlanta, GA, and moved to a cramped, noisy apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City. I did this with my longtime girlfriend. I took part in this decision to make the change, find a little more excitement, and get back to the northeast.
While we were in NYC, we got married, had our first child, unknowingly killed Allan Ginsburg (just kidding—fodder for another newsletter), and fell into a life that would end in divorce several years later when we had moved to a suburb of Boston and all the distractions of NYC that had been hiding our incompatibility disappeared.
In essence, on my first Saturn Return, I had come home obliterated, stinking of cheap whiskey.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids, and I give gratitude every day they are in my life. I couldn’t imagine living without them. And my time in New York City was transformative (mostly because I got to share it with my son) and brought me some cool opportunities.
Yet, the decisions I made during my first Saturn Return led to my moving to NYC via Atlanta from Boston, entering a marriage that ended in divorce, making inconsistent career choices that stranded me in a career I never wanted, and abandoning my writing hopes and dreams.
If a person makes good decisions in their life up to and during a Saturn Return, they will experience a strong affirmation that they are on the right track. A good decision is not an absolute good versus evil thing—it’s more of an appropriate adjustment for your spiritual journey in this life. For example, rather than attempting to grow my career in software development, I could have altered my course and taken my chances as a struggling writer.
If, up to and during the span of your Saturn Return, you ignored the messages about your life’s purpose and didn’t make the right choices to find your karmic path, a Saturn Return can feel like a complete disruption (the Tower Card in Tarot).
In short, Saturn Returns are associated with personal self-evaluations and potential disruptions roughly every 30 years… hmmm… life crisis…
Imagine my surprise when, this week, I came across this:
Our brain function is far from static throughout our lives. We already know that our capacity to learn, and our risk of cognitive decline, [vary] from when we are a newborn through to our 90s. Now, scientists may have uncovered a potential reason why this occurs: our brain wiring seems to undergo four major turning points at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83.
Wait, our brains change roughly every 30 years?!? Our wiring and how we think and see the world changes every 30ish years? Sounds like a Saturn Return.
So what are these changes in the brain?
…during the second phase, between 9 and 32 years old, “…information gets from one place to another more quickly.” (Alexa Mousley) This may support the development of skills like planning and decision-making…
So, our brains rewire at 30 to transform how we organize and make meaning in our lives.
And then at 66,
…connections between brain regions switch back to gradually losing efficiency. “…the 30s map onto a lot of different major lifestyle changes – for instance, having kids, settling down – so that could play a role,” says Mousley.
Hence, this brain transformation provides an analysis and re-visioning of things.
These major turning points in our brain seem, strangely, to coincide with Saturn Returns—times when the ways we make meaning in our lives no longer work or support us.
Oh, my stars.
Throughout my life, I have felt an urge to defend my interest in astrology, because I have a large bucket of anecdotal evidence that suggests its usefulness. Yet, as both a man of science (electrical engineer) and a practitioner of energy healing (Reiki Master), I have tried to conceive of many explanations for justifying it to others.
My most recent theory has to do with quantum entanglement. But, given these discoveries about the brain, it seems like I no longer have to work that hard. Neuroscience is having a moment these days (as I’ve written about previously) as it is being used to provide scientific reasons for many human conditions that aren’t directly related to the head.
I see astrology, tarot, mythology, archetypes from Jungian psychology, and other beliefs as ways to tell stories about our life experiences. They facilitate the making sense of the nonsensical, like the ancients inventing gods, fairies, election manipulation, and curious disease-tracking statistics.
Whatever you believe (if someone isn’t lying or hiding the evidence), I think that actual science will eventually show the way. It seems to have so far.
I guess what I’m saying is that however you make meaning in your life, try to be open to occasional introspection and don’t be afraid to make course corrections to keep you on your path (leaving a well-paying, secure job in NYC for an unpredictable venture into novel writing was too scary for me to attempt).
Whether it’s written in the stars or just a maturation of our brains, we seem predestined to experience considerable transformations. What we call it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we listen.
I’m at the beginning of my second Saturn Return, and boy am I feeling some of the ways I strayed from my path after my first one. Stay tuned.
Happy reading, happy writing, happy evolving.
David