Sitting with Saturn and Cycles

With Saturn nearing the end of its time in Aquarius, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own Saturn return.

Life always unfolds in cycles - the waxing and waning of the moon, the endless turning of the seasons, the path of water from rain to river to sea to cloud and down again. We count the years on calendars, but trees count them in rings, ticking away the days of budding to blooming to fruiting to falling apart and letting go.

Saturn counts the years to a slower metronome, with beats lumbering and long and vast intervals of silence between. I often think in terms of minutes and hours, days and weeks, but Saturn thinks in terms of eons, ringing in eternity to the tune of a funeral dirge. Under this unfathomable rhythm, Saturn traces great rings around human lives like the beautiful rings it wraps around itself.

It takes Saturn 10,756 Earth days to complete one revolution around the Sun, returning to the same spot it occupied roughly 29½ years prior. Each time Saturn returns to its natal position in the chart is the beginning and end of a Saturn cycle. In this way, Saturn weaves 2 to 3 great bounds around the average human life. And the first Saturn return largely forms the outer boundary between adolescence and adulthood. With a sharpened scythe, Saturn reaps the karmic harvest we sowed with our actions during the previous cycle.

As I’ve sat with Saturn and the closing of this chapter, I feel hemmed in by the here and now, keenly aware of my past errors and failings while simultaneously grateful for the good things coming to fruition. I'm grown up and growing older. Hopefully wiser too. I feel very humble and human-sized, living in greater intimacy with my impermanence. I am happy to be outlived by mountains and trees and seas, to be eclipsed by greater forces beyond my ken. Content to be a grain of sand in Saturn's hourglass, a blip in infinity.