And when you rise, rise like this

Saturn and the meaning of devotion

Dear Wanderer,

I didn’t know I would spend my life negotiating limits. Limits and boundaries protect us and keep us healthy, and if we are accustomed to them they make us feel safe. But when they are imposed on us they can feel like a cage.

Children learn healthy limits and boundaries from their parents and community, ideally, but only if healthy limits exist around them. If they don’t, a person can grow up with a tendancy to cross boundaries and ignore limits. Encountering those limits in the world, in the form of other people, or in their own bodies in the form of illness or injury can feel supremely unfair, and even like a violation.

I was such a person. I am aware that the limits my own body imposes on me exist in part because of my lack of respect for it’s limits earlier in life, as well as my lack of personal boundaries. Recent years have been a deep immersion course in the study of limits and boundaries. I learned them like my life depended on it, because it did.

I keep careful track of what comes into my body, as well as what happens when I am less careful. I am very attentive to my energy level and physical capacity, always. I do a daily shielding meditation and take care to notice and communicate with others when my personal boundaries are crossed. In this way, I have learned to live within my limits. I’ve learned to hold and respect my own boundaries, as well as (I hope) other peoples’. Days, weeks, sometimes even months go by when I don’t feel my cage.

Yet still, sometimes I feel like a prisoner in my own body. At these times its hard to see anything but all the things I will never do and can no longer have. I’ll never swim out to a buoy or jog or go to a dance class, never feel the thrill of exerting my body as hard as I can. I’ll suffer if I eat most of the foods considered staples by many. On my best days I’ll only ever have about half the energy most people have and on my worst I’ll barely be able to stand. In moments like this, the only thing to do is grieve for as long as it takes. Then, the clouds will part and I can see and feel all the blessings in my life again. I can enjoy my favorite things—my family, the sun on the river, watching birds wheel and swoop in the sky above me—so many things I could never list them. But I can only do this if I let myself feel like absolute shit for a little while, every once in a while.

Saturn is known as the Lord of Limits. I’ve become very close with him, but he gets a real bad rap with the nickname “the Greater Malific,” and is associated with the Devil. Liz Greene points out that it only takes the changing of a few letters for “Saturn” to become “Satan.” And it’s no wonder. Saturn’s limits can inflict pain, the kind of pain there is no easy way out of. He’s the king of “the way out is through.” He makes us work through the pain to earn what we need, and though the payoff matches the effort involved, it is HARD to submit to Saturn and do what is required. You cannot come out of that work unchanged.

We don’t like limits. We don’t like being told “No,” that we just can’t have it, no matter how much we want it. I wonder if Saturn came about the way he did because we live in a culture that habitually disrespects limits. As with the parent who doesn’t let the child eat ten cookies, limits may feel like they’re being imposed on us, but really, the limits are our own. The pain comes not from the limit but from the grief of letting go of the idea of being limitless.

In her classic book Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, Greene wrote: “He is not merely representative of pain, restriction and discipline; he is also a symbol of the psychic process, natural to all human beings, by which an individual may utilise the experiences of pain, restriction, and discipline as a means for greater consciousness and fulfillment.”

Saturn, then, is about growth. In his original incarnation he was a god of the harvest. He was the work it took to reap the harvest and the reaping of it as well. It’s not for nothing that we undertake this work. It might not be work we want to do but, as with the harvest that once sustained us through the winter, it’s work we need to do.

Saturn rules the sign Capricorn, the ultimate achiever of the zodiac. Unlike humble Virgo, content in her fastidiousness to serve, Capricorn is the CEO, building grand structures for posterity. All signs, all things have their place. We need Capricorn’s structure and discipline like we need our bones, which Saturn also rules.

But here’s the thing about built structures: they fail. This is true of all things, but we expect nature to move in cycles. We watch the seasons and the ocean tides. We expect everything in nature to eventually give way and, after a time, return to us anew.

Somehow it’s harder to accept the impermanence of that which we’ve built. Perhaps, again, its because we live in a culture that defies nature’s laws almost as a rule. Empires, skyscrapers, relationships, routines—we think they will last forever. Until they don’t. The devastating destruction of that which we have built too high and relied on too long is the essence of the infamous Tower card in tarot.

from the Solas Cartai tarot deck

Many depictions of the Tower card show two figures falling from a tower as it is struck by lightning and crumbles. The Unknown Author (!) of one my favorite books on tarot, Meditations on the Tarot, contrasts the Tower, which it relates to the concept of building, with the concept of growth, which they link to the Star card. Now the Star is all about vision. It’s the light in the night, the visible dream that guides and shows the way. The Star is hope. The Author calls this hope “the water that flows upward,” meaning the sap that flows up the stalks of the trees and flowers in spring to make the flowers bloom and the fruits swell in summer.

from the Tarot of the Spirit deck

The difference between building and growing is effort, planning, and fighting against the forces of nature to assert your will vs. the natural, unstoppable unfolding that is growth, being drawn upward by the Life force itself. This is not to say that growth is effortless: growth takes work.

One of my favorite people on social media, YK Hong, wrote recently that perhaps we need to shift our definition of “work.” I can’t find the post at this moment, but the general gist is that how we see “work” and “labor” is absolutely informed by the capitalist culture in which we live: work is hard, work is painful, work is boring. It’s something we begrudgingly trade for money, unless we’re in the fortunate minority who get to do the thing they love to do for money. But work, outside this context, could also be a joyful offering of love. It could be interlaced with togetherness and mutual nourishment. Life doesn’t have to be easy to be good, and neither, I’d wager, does work. I wonder if the way Saturn shows up for us has to do with our association of work with pain.

If you are over the age of 30 you have gone through at least one Saturn return. When Saturn returns to its place at the time of your birth, your structures will be tested. Those that no longer serve, or that aren’t built on a strong enough foundation, will fall. It’s a natural winter of sorts, when the leaves fall from our proverbial trees and the structures beneath are exposed. Arborists know this is the best time to prune.

I know I had fooled myself into thinking I was fine with the admittedly haphazard structures I had—until they fell, and I wasn’t. My Saturn placement is in the fourth house of home, roots and early nurturance, and during my Saturn return I had children. I utterly failed in my early days as a mother because my structures—inner and outer—failed me. On so many levels, I didn’t have what I needed to parent properly, and it hurt to fail my children like nothing before or since. But parenting was the first thing I ever did that I couldn’t just quit when things got hard. I loved my children far too much for that. And eventually, it got better—slowly, painfully, and non-linearly, it got better. With constant, unflagging effort it got better. Eleven years later, I can honestly say that I did that work. I’ve also reaped the rewards. I am utterly transformed.

Sometimes work feels like work and sometimes it feels like growth. My love for my children was the Star by which I steered. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to become better for them. I was devoted. Saturn is also the god of devotion. We dedicate ourselves to that which we love, submit and do what it takes, and it pays off. The funny thing is, by the time it does, we are so transformed we receive it as an entirely new version of ourselves.

I wonder, though, if our structures would fail us less if they more less “built” and more “grown.” When we are deep in the building phase we can consider the Star (cuz “consider” means “with the stars!”) and let her light draw us upward. We can act in accordance with our own limits, and the laws of nature and time—neither of which can be stopped or rushed. We can use our love toward this purpose, enact our devotion. And when it’s hard we can try to remember that out of all the pain and strain and discipline will come the growth we need. Because Saturn will teach us what we need to know, for as long as it takes, by whatever means necessary. (He loves us that much!?!?) I know from experience that when we not only love our limits but devote ourselves to them, the fewer the means that are necessary.

Bayo Akomolafe said that hope functions best when paired with dispair. When our built structures fail, as they are bound to, we need hope to see us through our utter ruin. Perhaps it takes utter ruin to get us to the point where we can truly grow, the sap rising in us only after our deepest winter. After all, Saturn was a harvest god. He knew, in the beginning, all about growth.

The sign of Capricorn is respresented by a mountain goat with a fish tail. I can’t help being struck by this image, a mountain goat, climber of heights, paired with a fish, swimmer of depths, in relation to the phrase “the water that flows upward.” Perhaps the truer nature of Capricorn is glorious growth on which everything else can rest. I read recently (can’t remember where, sorry) that the definition of “structural integrity” is the ability of a structure to bear weight, including its own. Like our bones. They grow with us, not against us, and they support us wherever we go. They are the last parts of us to decay, and can even be repurposed once we’re dead. They are what lasts. Not because we built them, but because of how they grew in us, without any effort on our part.

Our culture is a structure built in defiance of nature and time, and every natural limit. We are seeing it fall. But we will rise again, we the Life force. We rise every time we listen to our bodies and our instincts over the demands and threats of capitalism. We rise when we build in accordance with nature. We rise when our love and devotion are awaked and we are willing to do whatever it takes for each other. We rise every time hope triumphs over despair. And when we rise, we rise like sap.

Rising,

Sasha