saturn

I have been reading about astrological Saturn transits and what they mean. Saturn has been transiting my sign (Libra) since late October of 2009, and it has been a somber 2 years. Saturn will leave Libra in late October this year. As I learned from this incredibly informative site, "Significant decisions are often made during Saturn's hard transits to our personal planets. These transits slow life down (or at least, that is how we perceive it) and force us to live our lives in the present. Although Saturn transits can make life feel like a drudgery (these are often times when our lives seem to move at a snail's pace and advancements are hard to see), they also give us the opportunity to gain inner strength, to become more responsible for what we do and say, and to cut out waste or excesses in our lives. Basically, what happens is a form of paring or slimming down in the area of life affected by Saturn. We are getting rid of things in our lives that are not working for us in the real world, and focusing on improving and strengthening the things that do serve a useful purpose."

Yep, uh-huh. This is about right and then some.

Today also came with a poem that is (as almost always) quite fitting....


Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

--Donald Justice