We can't blame Hollywood for our Saturn problem.
We have seen so many movies where our heroine, ie Jamie Lee Curtis, hears a noise and goes outside on a dark, rainy night to investigate or she goes down into the basement of a strange house with a flashlight that promptly stops working.
We are yelling at the screen for her to stay safely tucked away on the couch with her blanket and bowl of popcorn. She never listens.
Our heroine must always overcome her fear - that's what makes her a heroine after all.
(of course if she is not the heroine of the movie this scene will not end well for her)
Now, I am convinced (after a lifetime of study and listening to this kid) that the best way to look at life is to see our journey here on planet Earth as a quest.
Us questers (and I am not liking that word now because it sounds too much like sequester and I am thinking of budget cuts and O.J. juries) do not get to know what is around every corner or how every situation we encounter is going to turn out.
It's this lack of certainty that makes us heroes. Our ancestors were born for their times. We were born for this.
If you are a student of A Course in Miracles (a self-study course I highly recommend) you will learn the course's most important lesson:
Herein lies the peace of God.
Knowing that our real life quest is more of a movie quest makes this whole quest business a lot easier. Nothing we can lose is real anyway - the real stuff can't be lost.
We know everything turns out all right in the end and if everything isn't alright it isn't the end.
If we know we are forever beings on a continuous series of quests, the stumbling blocks that show up on our path (which may look more like hatchet wielding orks) are easier to face.
This is what we are here to do after all.
If we turn away from our quest, ie stay safely tucked on our couch with a blanket and popcorn, life will take away our popcorn. Then life will take away our blanket. Then life will take away our couch.
This is where Saturn comes in.
During times of transition it can be a clearing exercise to check out what Saturn is doing in our charts. Saturn moves every couple years bringing changes to whatever part of our chart he is hitting and every seven years he creates some hard aspects to shake things up.
The incredibly rich narrative of Saturn in Roman and Greek (Cronus) mythology is too important for me to do it justice here in a paragraph - astrologer Liz Greene has a wonderful book on Saturn and of course the web has lots of info if you are drawn to finding out more.
In astrology Saturn is an aspect of the father/authority figure - the 2nd largest planet, the planet of contraction (Jupiter, the largest planet, is the planet of expansion so we expand a little more than we contract) - he's about boundaries, responsibilities, karma, commitments, self-control - the stuff that defines (meaning = outlines) us.
Some of Saturn's harder tests are our first Saturn return (Saturn takes 28 -29 years to come full circle back to the place he occupied at our birth) in our late 20's and our second Saturn return in our late 50's.
(there are also other aspects like the Neptune Square Neptune at about the age of 41 and the Uranus/Uranus opposition at about the age of 43 - one or both of which throws pretty much every one of us into a mid-life crisis, Chiron return 48-50, Pluto trines Pluto at 58, Uranus Squares Uranus at 63 - both new beginnings)
Saturn has been working his way through Scorpio since October 5, 2012. This will continue until December 23, 2014; and then he finishes up his transit from June 14, 2015 to September 17, 2015.
Tomorrow we have the last full moon in Scorpio while Saturn is housed there.
I can't believe I am turning a Full Moon post into 3 posts, but I am! Back tomorrow to finish this up with the best ways to work with this energy.