I will go into two Saturn Love Stories because of the uncanny timing after going into some basics on the nature of Saturn as seen in my own natal chart.
I have to admit that it took me some time to really get my arms around my own natal Saturn (conjunct Eros) position which is always the first trick, of course. Saturn at 7 degrees Capricorn on the 5th House cusp and a one degree trine to Pluto on the AC in Virgo at 6 degrees and in a minor grand trine, both Pluto and Saturn sextile Venus at 12 degrees Scorpio (conjunct Neptune 8 and asteroid Dejanira at 11) I think what got me can be seen right in the nature of Eros Saturn conjunct on 5th House cusp. I just could not imagine the romantic and sexual nature of Saturn kind of expecting anything but romance from Saturn and a Saturn Return. One thing I have learned about astrology over time is just how important the Houses are for us for they are where the rubber meets the road. 5th House is not just children, romance, play and creativity but also the House of the Sun primarily representing the heart and light and the expressing the one’s natural self openly even bravely. The 5th House energy wants to Roar.
Even with let’s call it the help of this minor grand trine, Saturn restricts and limits that 5th House energy and looking at the chart visually, Saturn really is the lead planet in a large bowl chart with a packed 4th House and what is Saturn doing at the lead of (all of me!) it’s Saturn Thing restricting, limiting and always demanding structure and discipline … all that is a natural anathema to that Sagittarius energy so in the vernacular, a stupendous “Buzzkill”, this Saturn of mine.
One thing that helped me was looking into the nature of my natal Sun square the nodes of the moon this so called, “Skipped Step” with my NN the resolution node for this skipped soul step, so called, and here the 5th House ruler is challenged perhaps by soul work to resolve some unresolved issue around Self and Self Expression. I only really bore down on astrology seriously in May of 2017 but I did so then with a passion and paid for a professional consultation at that time with an astrologer who really encouraged me – well, like this, “I am not even going to advise you to not obsess over your relationship, David, probably not possible, but what I would say is that it is imperative that you find something else to obsess over as well. This could be anything, really, but you have quite a grasp of astrology after only a few months, probably the Neptune in Scorpio in the third, but why not get into astrology? Whatever it is, you need to go into 100 percent and master it, dedicate yourself to something, anything, and follow through with it until you are a master of it.”
I asked about the Saturn Return coming and we went into it and this was his advice really to align with the coming Saturn energy as well as just in general. So with astrology for me, right out of the gate, this looming 2nd Saturn Return was on my mind. The truth is after a catastrophic illness that nearly killed me almost ten years earlier, I had been stumbling forward with nothing, almost no physical possessions and focused solely upon this quest to find my life partner. I quickly grasp that Saturn would not be thrilled with this performance. I want to badly to put down roots all that fourth house energy achingly badly but the opposite happens and I drift rootless as a tumble weed along for nearly a decade by the time Saturn shows up to take inventory Winter Solstice of 2017 entering Capricorn. My first thought was in early summer of 2017, barely scratching the surface of astrology and focused upon my own chart and myself, that I must get myself into a stable position in my own home. I had to obtain some kind of stability was almost a feeling as if in order to successfully weather a coming storm of this Saturn Return, just to describe my feeling of the experience, it was all over me that Fall of 2017 when I moved to Ocean Springs this cool. little art town on the gulf coast of Mississippi.
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Saturn Love Story One, “The Secret Lies of Garland”
August of 2017, after 33 years, I heard from my 1st wife who I married at the age of 20 having been my girlfriend to whom I lost my virginity in 9th grade of junior high school. I had broken it off after 4 years and she had just finished nursing school was an existential crisis for me was in therapy and realizing that now my wife would naturally want children and knowing that I was not certain that I really loved her. The thought of divorce with children and having all that happened to me happen to now my own children really was heavy on my mind. I just had a bad feeling after some things between us and I lost faith that I could trust her going forward and worse, I began to have my own doubts and clearly, it seemed, this is no time to start a family. Keeping in mind here that this 33 years is not far off of the Saturn cycle and very well represents the adult years of our lives in general wherein we are prone to be building a family and a life, this so called prime of our lives. Saturn is all about our maturation cycles.
After a text from out of the blue, we spoke on the phone in the evening for hours and one thing that hit my like a ton of bricks was how totally blank my memory was as Karen spoke of things that until that moment, I had completely forgotten. I was aware of the memory loss from childhood but the fact that it extended into even early adulthood kind of shocked me. From late August until early December 2017 we then corresponded daily by phone and text and it is hard to describe only to say that I felt that I had to explore this possibility of reunion seeing it very much as a karmic opportunity that literally came to me.
A friend said during this time, “Karen couldn’t get you last night so she called me and goddamn does she love you, man”.
Something is way off just can’t tell and I feel like I need to wait until she tells me. There is just something wrong. I feel like it is something that maybe will have to be dealt with in person if we get so far as meeting. During this time between August and early December, Karen’s birthday came up and her twenty something daughter called me with a plan to surprise Karen by showing up there for her birthday party. My boyfriend and I will pick you up at the airport and you can stay here just have to buy a ticket. But I told her no and explained that I felt her mother had to take the lead in this relationship and control the first meeting. I thanked her profusely for thinking of me like that and said sincerely were it simply up to me, I would really love that. The daughter told me that her mom had been talking about me for years as the only man who ever really loved her and understood her and confessed that she had been the one to send that first text after having found a Facebook profile. I thought “the only man that loved her” part was ironic since my issue with her was that I was not sure that I did really love her in the first place. This was second week of October with the birthday party. Deep down I felt perhaps guilty about the way I had ended things so felt that I owed her one, or at least owed her patience. Finally, at the beginning of December, she said that she could get away for a week and wanted to come visit me in Ocean Springs.
Here I will short hand but to note Saturn is at 29 degrees Sagittarius where it has been an unholy terror anyway for two and a half years just as my birthday hits on December 17th 2017. A few days later on the solstice, it enters Capricorn. There is a drive to the New Orleans airport at night in an ice storm that is not supposed to happen in Ocean By-God Springs Mississippi to pick up a friend returning from the Caribbean. His flight gets delayed severely en-route so we go to the French Quarter to find a place for dinner and drinks maybe hang out since it looks like it’s going to be midnight before my friend’s flight finally arrives. You would think this would be the really cool part?
It’s freezing cold in the French Quarter and we are both lightly dressed thinking we’d pretty much be in the car for this trip. We can find only bars full of seems like mostly college kids and all very loud and me with tinnitus. We really look for a quiet restaurant but end up in a bar just because it’s so damn cold. I said look we have a ton of time so let’s get drinks and ask the waiter where the nearest restaurant is and get warm for God’s sake. She very much agreed. But sitting across from each other at a small table, we could not hear each other even speaking in a very loud voice. We finally get a drink at some point and are trying to talk some and I cup my hands around the sides of my mouth wagging my tongue suggestively and she finds this to be an outrageous offense. When we finally get back to the car, she says informs me how crude that was and takes the opportunity to chastise me on my use of profanity in general. We end up at an all night diner near the airport and spend a couple hours there trying to hash things out. I try to be diplomatic, Libra Sun and Moon my first wife, but I tell her that I am anything but crude and that at almost 58 have no intentions of having my mouth washed out with soap when I curse. I am already thinking of this whole evening as the New Orleans fiasco. This is the second day of the visit and I ask if she is yet ready to share the “secret” with me that she has been speaking of that apparently is of crucial import somehow?
But no, she says, not yet.
My friend in the picture complicates things a lot. I had hinted strongly unwilling to come out and ask that it would be way better timing for me if he could wait a week and pointed out that it’s not like I just want privacy to fuck, we are in the middle of something important just now and would be great to have this week together to hopefully sort it out but he needs to come back now. He says that he will only stay overnight then drive back north the next day and get out of our way. The timing is disastrous as our ill fated reunion progresses poorly. I am beginning to get the picture in terms of Saturn and I feel this is the culmination one way or another of a thirty year long karmic cycle. We go over things from our adolescence together and marriage ,both of us virgins to each other, and her memories are mostly revelations to me and just this alone is blowing my mind. I can’t fathom how I could have forgotten so much of my past so completely? I can’t even describe the ominous vibe of this reunion after Tim has come into the picture and when we finally get home at about 3 in the morning, we go to sleep without making love and not saying much. I feel myself slipping back into give her space mode and am biting my tongue but before we go to sleep, I say as nicely as I can, “I think after just what we have been through in the last five months, I kind of deserve to know what is on your mind, Karen? What is this big secret that you keep talking about revealing to me?
She said she would talk about it tomorrow just too exhausted - a state I shared so fine with me. Such a weird feeling hard to describe as I had told my friend sleeping in the 2nd bedroom now a few months ago, something is not right. I have a strong sense that whatever it is, I have to hear it from her, this secret it surely seemed. She had not spoken of a secret until she suddenly decided to come and it sort of gave the impression that this so called secret was the reason for the visit?
She shares this secret late in the morning when we are in the living room drinking coffee with my friend thankfully still sleeping or at least in his room. She had been talking a lot about Ireland where she had visited several times and felt she had some Christian Mission. She said she wanted me to write a book about her ex husband’s infidelity impregnating a much younger nurse. She started by saying, I should add, this book would be called, “The Twisted Lies of Garland” and somehow in my head I thought that it had something to to with Ireland but Garland was this girl who was only 19 years old who now ex husband had an office affair all about ten years ago. It was kind of like an explosion in my head as she was speaking and I began to see what she had in mind, rather simple, really. I listened understanding that I likely did not really love her before and definitely did not now barely finding myself liking her as I listen to this story that is pure, unadulterated projection on her part.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, “but what I see is a very powerful, mature adult man, also a doctor, using a relatively young and innocent woman for sex. I don’t want any part of that, Karen”. At this she retreated to the bedroom obviously in a bit of a huff. Truth be told, I was angry but with the anger came again the whole Saturn Return thing and was so obviously connected this whole thing with Karen, my first wife, about whom I had carried this guilt my whole life. About thirty minutes later, she came back out in tears almost hysterical and ended up in my lap and she is thin but not a small woman so it is a bit of a show, not going to lie. She is literally trembling and crying so hard that she cannot breathe more or less speak. Still trembling, she managed something about being scared to death, just scared to death, but having no idea at all why or of what? We were going to drive up to her mother’s house during the week for an overnight not too far away maybe six hours for one there were pictures of us there that the mom had stored. I was a bit surprised to her that the mom was still alive but she had Karen when young and was not only alive but mid 70’s and doing well.
I asked her what do you need from me? What do you need right now?
She said finally calming enough to speak clearly but still trembling, extricating herself from my lap, “I’m just going to pack and go to mom’s, I’ll get an uber to the airport and get a rental.”
In my mind very clearly I heard, Reaction Attachment Disorder realizing after listening to her stories these five months and the last few days that she has never really attached to a man her whole life and that I was not at all emotionally available when younger just all Sagittarius that energy of “Over There!” But I just agreed sure I understand and then my friend comes out perhaps because he heard the crying stop IDK. I couldn’t even begin to explain but he is saying that he will be packed and out in an hour because he has to be back up north for business ASAP. One thing leads to another and I point out that my friend will be driving within 30 minutes of the town Karen’s mom lives in maybe he could drop you off and you can get a plane back from your mom’s when you decide to head home? They agree to this and split and I am left just in wonder of the whole Saturn Return thing thinking, “Jesus it’s just starting what am I in for here?”
This is all about a week before my birthday December 17th and after a few days, she sends a text finally acting like nothing had happened thanking me for being so supportive of her and her dreams. I wrote back and said that I would rather not speak with you anymore and would prefer to release you to your highest good. It was not at all a happy ending but left me certain now that I did not love this woman and appalled by what life had done to her.
On my birthday, much to my surprise, I got a call from Karen’s mother who said she got my number from Karen and wanted to wish me a happy birthday. She started to go a lot into the past when her husband, Karen’s dad had died saying numerous times something along the lines of, “… but as I recall, David, you were a sweet man, always your nose in a book, very sensitive, very smart and I know you worked at night but every day you would be at the hospital when Karen came to see Sam, you were so supportive”. After about the third iteration of this, I began to understand that whatever Karen had said about me must have been pretty bad but I wasn’t about to triangulate and go into it plus I wasn’t sure if she might be a little drunk, honestly. But she was very friendly and very open saying Karen had left to go home and even apologizing for her daughter’s behavior which I totally let go changing the subject. She lamented how now at 78 men no longer paid any attention to her and how much she missed the attention of men now in her old age. By the end of maybe a 15 or 20 minute conversation, I’m back in wonder of Saturn just wrapping this karmic cycle up here on my very birthday with a big yellow bow.
Little that I know, Saturn is just getting warmed up here.
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Saturn Love Story Two, “This One Leaves a Scar"
She choose the date to meet and it is the 24th of February with her birthday on 25th and also the exact conjunct of transiting Saturn to my natal position to the minute. I had told a friend months earlier that I had a feeling that the one would come in when this happened. We were together until after midnight and later in the day on the 25th, I discovered that transiting Saturn hit my natal exactly at midnight - or close. This date the 25th of February also has significance for me calling it my second birthday when 5 grams of dried psilocybin changed my life.
The experience is magical and I think that I can be forgiving my superstition around all this but it was quite a coincidence, that much must be said. Soon, I begin to see that the relationship will end when Saturn retrogrades back over my natal positions in only a few months time and this leads to some strange head space not wanting to create a problem. But the relationship ends a week before Saturn in retro hits my Saturn. I don't want to go into all the details but it is as if I am discovering love for the first time in my entire life here at the age of 58 and the sudden rise and promises and then sudden loss hit me like a freight train.
Confession building up to this one, I have what I would call a one night stand on my birthday pure self pity party not going to try and put lipstick on a pig and almost unknown for me to have one night stands only other time but after the call from Karen’s Mom that screw inside turned and I closed the door and walked away but maybe emotionally kind of shell shocked. But this lingered into a few week affair that ended badly, of course. I came down with the worst flu of my life by New Years and that lasted about a month. At this time, I am doing at least one natal chart a day research for me, learning, a good three hours or more per chart with a follow up video interview wherein I always feel free to ask a lot of questions all helping me to learn and I’d like to think helping the people I work with as well but during this time, it is all I can do to manage a chart a day. Practically a girl in many ways, I get on dating site on Valentine’s Day but still not feeling great so not really inspired to any effort just want to see who is out there.
A week or so later, a local woman messages me who seems actually normal but I also see she is young, 48 and I am 58 and have never dated younger women before. We text some but not much and after about a week she says that she wants to talk on the phone. We talk forever on our first call and I am in love by the end of it and later she says that she felt the same. In synastry, our cardinal axis is aligned at a close degree. I live in an amazing neighborhood within a hundred yards of the little downtown restaurant zone in Ocean Springs with a string of progressive restaurants many with live entertainment on any given night and year round with outdoor heaters so you can sit on the outdoor patio still on these cooler winter nights. She agrees to meet and walk over to a nearby restaurant with it’s own microbrewery one weekend evening.
Well, our first meeting – and have the chart I’m big on first meeting charts myself – was the most romantic and then sexual meeting of my young life. She stayed until after midnight, the 25th of February and I had a little gift for her birthday, a necklace. The relationship lasted only a few months yet cleaves my heart nearly in half leaving a scar like the grand canyon. I know it is over and I know what it was for myself at least and from this I learned about “Lessonships” and what I came to call, “Soul Mate Hit Jobs” – soulmate relationships that uncanny and instant attraction and report, the proverbial, “It’s like I’ve known you before” phenomenon that is not exactly rare, I don’t think? In the inscrutable mind of God, the soul families and soul mates live and die and live again on and on all connected literally by strings that our souls cannot see inhabiting these DNA Carbon Machine bodies, it seems. Most of us, I should say, in all due respect to mystics, saints and mad scientists.
But in the end, what I take away from the relationship is the same I brought into the relationship, myself. This one, though, this one took me out at the knees. My self crawled out of this relationship having been taken down to the ground by her loss. It did not kill me and it did not exactly make me stronger, hopefully different, a little more self contained.
The heart of it for me was in the astrology as I grew in understanding over even these few months of our relationship since that gives me grounding and connection to Source in it all the fact that in essence these secret threads can be seen in our natal, progressed and predictive astrology charts, a glimpse into the finely woven threads weaving this seamless cloth together that is The Universe Itself. What I could see was the nature of our genuine incompatibility at many important levels obviously played out as the relationship itself played out. But in the astrology, I can also see if I squint and tilt my head j u s t so the Hand of God. I need more connection and she needs more freedom emotionally it’s magnets repulsing each other. I am a soft man bit of the bane of my life maybe even part of this Saturn Return in the 5th House in terms of romance. I have made peace with myself and I am much too needy even at some theoretical best for this freedom loving force of nature, I tell myself. And mostly as a Venus in Scorpio lost in a search for the soulmate ala a 7th House in Pisces Neptune transit, there are places I will always be magnetically pulled to dark, wounded places in her that she has decided that she does not wish to go. A big lesson in this and in astrology for me is simply within the Venus in Scorpio that must come to understand and respect other people’s limits in terms of intimacy and their boundaries when it comes to their deep psychology. When in love, this Venus in Scorpio energy is compulsively drawn to the lover’s deepest, darkest places – remember Pluto kidnapped Proserpina taking her into the underworld – try this with a Libra, could be a tussle.
What it comes down to for me very much obvious from this experience is that I need in my life not only a life partner but friends with whom I feel an emotional connection characterized by an openness, an easy flow of energy back and forth. In 2012 came up with this intention, “let her of open heart come to me only who is right and true for me as I am right and true for her, only so as is perfect for each causing no harm to either”.
There are many people who have had their hearts crushed especially if they are older and I have tended toward women my age during this 7th House Neptunian Find The Soulmate Transit so have seen this myself. Women who insist that all men are a certain way, men saying the same about women. Walls go up with age that can become over time very hard to take down. I myself am apparently for better or worse impervious to cynicism in matters of love and while wounded, yes, riddled with ridiculous Relationship PTSD, my heart always remained open and hopeful. I never turned bitter and one of the many things about Aurora that I love is that in spite of her challenging childhood, she is so loving and open-hearted and strong like she just shook that off and started loving her way forward into life and thank God Almighty eventually into my life.
My God the “Problems with Neptune” in association with all things love and romance is an epic subject mostly to simplify think of The Romance Phase when hormones literally caste a spell over us. But all planetary energy is on a spectrum and in terms of Neptune it is the higher octave of Venus and both are Divine Feminine and receptive energy highly compatible and can speak to Unconditional Love. What I see in Aurora is a natural flowing unconditional love – an ability to love unconditionally. I can hope that what we have together is the rare Neptunian Relationship that I call, “The Gomez and Morticia” Love.
Sometimes Neptune is not an illusion at all but the highest spiritual expression of energy.
