Some Things Saturn Does To Love
Last week I wrote about Saturn’s guidance for living and loving on Earth. This week I’m sharing some language for the blocks to love that Saturn can offer. It seems like Saturn gets in the way of love, but right now I’m thinking of Saturn as one of our many paths to love. When Saturn touches a point in your chart, whether you have a planet in Capricorn, or Saturn is in a major aspect with a significant point in your chart, it usually brings these experiences / sensations:
a high level of responsibility to every relationship, a feeling of obligation from the first moment you start to engage with someone on any level
a high standard for your own and others actions (depends on the specific placement as to whether it’s more focused on you or others, but usually both), that most of the time you don’t live up to. Or if you do live up to it, you ignore when you do
fear about getting love wrong, saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, to the point where you sometimes feel frozen in expressing and receiving love
not giving yourself permission to be a learner, expecting you should know how to do relationships perfectly from the beginning / all the time
score keeping, a feeling of being burdened by all of the things you have to do in a relationship, but not necessarily checking if you really need to do those things
There are many more things that Saturn can offer in the form of what feels like blocks, but that’s a list so you get the idea. I am using the word “offer” here because we are gifted experiences we call “blocks” so that we can break through them. Constraints or blocks, difficulties, are the material through which we sculpt a new way of being. They’re how we even perceive growth. Saturn is our guide in this way. The places that feel hard, stuck, stagnant, are the offerings. I’m not saying we need to be grateful or even like them, I’m just saying if we remember they are built in to the experience, then we don’t think something is wrong if we have blocks.
I am in territory I was last week (last forever?) but I can’t get over how many times I need to hear this. I keep having this thought in many facets of my life: it shouldn’t be this hard. And I’m not saying it has to be hard, I’m not saying it’s inevitably hard. Ease and pleasure are welcome here.
I’m just saying the thought it shouldn’t be this hard causes a lot of suffering. A lot of stress. Because anything could be going on in my life, and if I add that thought to it, it makes it harder. If I accept that it’s just as hard as it is, there’s more space. But if I’m thinking it shouldn’t be this hard, it compresses the situation. It suggests I should have something figured out that I don’t, or I should find another fake life where it’s not so hard.
I get to learn more about this when I’m doing astrology readings, which is an evergreen sacred experience of witnessing I get to do. A thought I have often there is: wow, that’s a life. There is a life. I’m graced with this work experience where people sometimes tell me about the life experiences that bring them to their knees. And more and more I think: what is happening before me is a person living. To live is to encounter difficulty. To live at all (it seems to me!) is to hold handfuls of questions about what to do about the complex impossible situation in front of us, and there is more often than not, a complex impossible situation in front of us. That’s what I mean by: There is a life. To live is also to encounter joy and connection. But one doesn’t exist without the other, as far as I can tell.
Saturn is one of the names I’ve learned for a sacred teacher who gives us blocks we get to break through, as one of the profound experiences of living a life.
Acceptance seems passive, but now I’m thinking of it like the observer effect. We* had this false notion in science for a minute that we could observe something without changing it. As if we could choose when our presence affected others or not. And then we realized that was not a real thing, there’s no such thing as observing without changing.
There’s no such thing as accepting without changing a situation. Accepting is an action, as quiet and still as it often is. Accepting opens worlds.
Saturn shows us our blocks to love, and our first step is to accept them, which already begins to change them.
Or something like that?! I’ll probably keep writing about this forever, because I need to be reminded! All the prayers for you today to be able to see your blocks as paths toward where you need to go.
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*I’m using “we” here as a shorthand but a more specific “we” might be those of us from empire lineages… “We” called life forms other than humans “it” and in doing so deluded ourselves that we could be separate. Something that indigenous people knew was false before, during, and after this concept came and went in the evolution of science. I recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing for further thinking on how we name life can reinforce or dissolve our separation from the rest of the planet.