Excerpt from "Saturn Returns" : Chapter Thirteen

“I live my life in growing orbits, which move out over the things of the world, perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”

“Do you think that’s the German writer, Rilke?" I asked. "It sounds more like ...John O’Donahue to me, do you know him, Peter—the Irish writer?”

“I don't no....I guess I’m a bit ‘parched’ spiritually, eh?” Peter pursed his lips. “We’re drinking up the goodness here Isabelle, but don’t get too enchanted here—this place, this Lindisfarne-- is the place that almost took Sophie’s life.

"I know. I’m trying to understand why she came here, but we won’t get that, Peter, if we can’t get beyond our ideas of right and wrong, of what is true, and what is not."

Peter winced. “I can feel myself holding back—I have too many old ideas about Christianity. I’m trying to see what is good here now, not what they did wrong in the past….yet the past is everywhere, seeping out of the walls and rocks. And some of it is as quaint and sweet as this lichen and moss on this stone wall—and some of it—well, it will show itself, I think.”

And it did.

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The Saturn Return, Part Two

     How do we survive, thrive, and reinvent ourself during the Saturn Return? Saturn is the instinct to commit. Ask yourself this: “If I do nothing else in my entire life, what would be most important for me to make an effort at doing or being?” What would that look like? Would it be creating a better family than the one you were raised in? Inspiring others in a way you wish you had been inspired? Financially, emotionally, or spiritually finding peace or success?



Imagine that you could make a phone call to the “oldest wisest part of yourself” and ask this question. What would you want to build? What do you need to do to get there? Are you doing it yet? The good news is that despite Saturn’s connection with plain hard work and self-questioning, it’s also a time when opportunities present themselves to be thoughtfully examined Procrastination now seems like a bad idea, but quick change isn’t in the air either. Things must be taken slowly and old ways and habits may be having their “death and rebirth” and we need to be patient with ourselves as we move through the process of rebirthing and reinventing ourselves.


Maybe the old lover has finally committed “the last straw” and you know you must end the relationship. You make the difficult break, and then accept an invitation to go out on a date. New possibilities are in the making but the grieving process may take longer than you wish, and your heart slows you down. Or you’ve landed the new job, but the learning curve on it sends you home in tears for the first two weeks. But you hang in there. Or you’re finally pregnant, but you’re so sick you can’t enjoy it. Patience and endurance…hallmarks of Saturn.

 That’s the feeling of the Saturn Returns, but look what’s coming! If you follow through with your new vision, you’ve taken the first steps towards a true new beginning. Saturn likes to create forms and structures and new beginnings, but not without strong foundations. Old unfinished business—your psychological baggage--will stand in the way before your new birth takes place. Real change and self-reinvention calls for you to trust the process as it unfolds.


The Saturn Returns are marked by these kinds of personal milestones. We move, marry, divorce, go back to school, have a baby, leave a job or pick up on an old dream we’ve forgotten about. We do something different. The navigational tools are twofold: we must take a chance now, and we must give it all we can. When we are willing to do that, we are be rewarded.


Saturn asks us “Whose movie am I in?”” and then challenges us to be the director and author. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just read some “manual to life” and have the ghost of “Christmas Future” come to us to show the way? Instead, we are called to become our own best “author-ity,” to truly become the author of our life.


We’re being asked now to re-write our personal life script with our own spiritual muscle. Not always so easy, especially when our life drama is full of people who no longer reflect who we really are and what we are becoming. “Letting go” is another key concept for this time


The human unconscious has ways of conjuring up people, events, and situations that challenge us to the bone. Psychologists sometimes call it projection, and we feel it as the remarkable synchronicity between what’s happening in our inner lives with what’s happening to us in the outer landscape—I don’t think it’s just an uncanny coincidence. At times it’s as if we’ve conjured up whoever or whatever we most wanted to avoid—or attract—in our lives. It’s as if the unconscious “hires” other people to play out parts of our life stories—this one is the boss, this one the victim, this one the unfaithful lover.


At the Saturn Returns you’ve probably “had it” with some of these people and situations and it’s time to write them out of the script of your life drama. At each Saturn Return we are challenged to take back our projections and to look at the drama of our life as our responsibility. It’s too late to blame anyone anymore.


The Second Saturn Return, in the late fifties, is also a time that calls for concrete actions in the real world, but it can be more subtle and occasionally more insidious. If we don’t do what needs to be done now, we might not be given a second chance. If we put off our yearly physical exam or don’t stop the spread of some nasty growth, it may be too late later. If we take a stiff upper lip attitude and deny the fact that “the job is killing me” it may indeed kill you. We need to find ways to “fall upwards” rather than “falling downwards.” We don’t measure our life by the same standards as we did the first half of life: Carl Jung said that when he warned us not to measure the afternoon of our life by the same expectations and attitudes as we did in the “morning of our life.”



As the body ages, depression and physical difficulties inevitably arise, yet as the body becomes less an object of vanity it’s a chance for the Spirit to rise. This is also the time when we may feel an uprising of irritability as a few old habits or attitudes have the chance to rear their nasty heads again. This is because now is the time to cut them off—to be done once and for all with them. You may ask yourself: why am I dealing with these same issues again? The answer is: because you’ve almost resolved them. And the last straw can be the hardest. The hallmark of the second Saturn Return is that as you deal with the old pockets of unfinished business, you gain a new life as well as the sense that you are truly coming into yourself with more integrity than ever before. But it’s a process that involves choices—and when you make good choices, you can be “born again” spiritually—not necessarily in religious sense—but in the wider meaning of that metaphor.


And how do you do that? Priorities need to be clearer, and metaphorical closets and basements cleaned. There is a need to look at what we feel disillusioned about and let the illusions go, lest these old ghosts feed on us and make us bitter. It’s time to slow down and allow more sweetness and companionship into our lives, and to let the wild dogs of ambitious willfulness fight elsewhere. © Elizabeth Spring  Please ask permission before reprinting to: elizabethspring@aol.com  Homepage: www.elizabethspring.com For more information about Saturn Returns: http://thesaturnreturns.blogspot.com/