devoted to desire

saturn in aries, pt. i

“ … Several years later, I went to a movie called A.I. in which a woman rejects her android son. Imprinted with love for his mother forever, the android remembers the story Pinocchio, in which a Blue Fairy changes a puppet to a real boy. The android boy thinks how if he became real then his mother would love him. He travels across the country until he finds a statue of a woman in a sunken amusement park. The woman is blue, and the android sits in front of it, underwater, for a thousand years, saying, over and over, ‘Please, Blue Fairy. Make me a real boy. Please, Blue Fairy. Make me a real boy. Please, Blue Fairy. Make me a real boy.’

I sat in the movie theater, and I watched the child, knowing it didn’t matter whether [the prayer was to become a boy or girl], the prayer was to become real. And I thought to myself, The Blue Fairy couldn’t do it. God couldn’t do it. I did it.

The magic formula to make someone real is very simple. Trust their desire. Believe in passion.

This is a true story. It is all a true story, and a very old one.”

- Rachel Pollack, The Beatrix Gates

~ ~ ~

near the end of may, a pretty sizeable shift happened in the cosmos—steady and stable saturn, moved from the healing, merging, dream-like waters of pisces, into the assertive, passionate, desire-chasing fire of aries. the luminary will only move through this space directly for about 6 weeks before it begins to back away like a nervous and shy lover, retrograding ultimately back to pisces at the beginning of september. the retrograde will end in november, and saturn will directly ingress into the fire sign once more in february of 2026, where it will stay for more than two years, and where it is considered to experience its fall due to (seemingly) profoundly mis-aligned archetypal energies. all of this is made more energetically complex by the presence of dreamy, dissolvey, imaginative neptune cycling into aries and retrograding there as well, and i hope to speak more to that in future pieces. there’s just so much to say about the astrological significance of this saturnian back-and-forth dance (yes, i could’ve easily typed “march” but i do believe that saturn can dance!).

but, to start, let’s consider retrograde motion in general.

retrograding is typically considered to be astrologically significant for its challenging and difficult energies. if we really allow ourselves to be open, to consider and listen to the wisdom offered by retrograde motion, we might find something deeper, more meaningful, and more supportive than the fear-mongering trials-and-tribulations interpretation so frequently offered up by pop astrology.

in the night sky from planet earth, this transition to retrograde motion and then back to direct looks like a gentle swirl, elegantly, slowly, and carefully calligraphied across the ecliptic, a choreography of grace and care. it as if the planet is being oscillated back and forth by dynamic repelling and attracting forces—it appears to slow down, stop, change direction, and speed up again, before repeating this loop back in the other direction when it stations direct.

in historical cosmologies, astronomers explained these back-and-forth loops with the concept of the epicycle—an orbit within an orbit. in these geocentric models, the idea was that the luminary itself didn’t really properly orbit the earth—rather, the planet revolves around its own little circle, while that circle’s empty center itself orbits the earth. so, in this model, as the planet swings from one side of its epicycle to the other, it really does change directions.

while the epicycle idea is geometrically beautiful and has some important mythological implications, our current heliocentric model now helps us understand that this retrograde motion is not actually caused by the planet literally reversing course. rather, as the earth and the planet both orbit the sun, due to variations in the sizes and curves of the ellipses they sweep out and the speed at which they do so, there will inevitably be times when the earth catches up to and then overtakes the planet as they both follow their parallel paths. and, eventually, as both planets continue their circular dance and the angles between them continue to flux, the planet will again overtake the earth. the result is a seeming change from direct motion to apparent retrograde motion and then back again. it’s an illusory parallax, the result of humans observing planets which orbit the sun, while on a planet which also orbits the sun.

(in the image above, the yellow orb represents the other planet being observed from earth, and the green dots represent its projected motion as it appears from earth— apparent retrograde motion)

thus, astrologically we can say that a luminary’s retrograde is in part a consequence and reminder of our dwelling place here within mama earth. although the beautiful dance and calligraphy of the pirouetting luminary is witnessed up in the heavens above, the phenomenon is profoundly earthy and embodied. it invites us back into our bodies with their unique points-of-view, perspectives which are completely inseparable from our home, this earth, and the splendor and mystery of all of her ecological interconnected webiness. if we lived on mercury, for some portions of the year we would see the sun itself in apparent retrograde motion, due to the ratio between the mercurial day and the mercurial year—the sun would rise, swing back around and partially hide behind the horizon, and then rise again. imagine the mythologies we would have written had we been mercurians! the specific pattern of apparent retrograde motion of the planets that we observe from earth is part of our unique mystic and mythic inheritance. the ancient dance of mars and venus, venus’ association with the five-pointed star (and with apples, as a five-pointed star appears when you cut one lengthwise in half), the story of persephone and all of its psychospiritual and earthy significance—these are all symbols and meanings that we have, sometimes unconsciously, pulled from the wonder of retrograde motion. the motion of the planets in the night sky, like so many natural phenomena, have been encoded into our bodies and our conscious and unconscious wisdom, through countless eons of evolution spent embedded in this particular planet, this earth. retrograde is a reminder that although philosophers and scientists have tried for ages to construct a completely objective “god’s eye-view” (which some have more correctly called “a view from nowhere”) of the cosmos and our place in it, we can truly never escape the fact that reality will always by necessity be already filtered through the lens of our own earth-enrobed perception, and our own mythmaking. i certainly do not ascribe to the science-vs-spirituality feud—it is just so silly and reductive to pit two very human forces against each other when they have the capacity to complement each other so beautifully—but i have to point out the incredible irony that while attempting to replace myth with reason, science has in fact erected an enormous myth of its own: that it is preferable or even possible to live a human life divorced from an embodied perspective which emerges from our deep connection to the earth. subverting science’s own discoveries about the illusory nature of retrograde motion, we can remember that one cannot live a life completely separated from a frame of reference. while modern post-industrial, capitalistic, and colonial worldviews, all of which western scientism has in many ways fueled and fed, attempt to de-world us, the energies gifted to us by the astrological concept of the retrograde can aid in re-situating us radically in the world and the frame of reference that has been entrusted to us as children of earth, intrinsically bound up in her ebbs and flows, in the spiraling of her seasons.

retrograde motion is also an invitation to whole-heartedly embrace whatever path you are on, no matter how loopy or backwards it may look to others. it’s an invitation for deep, radical trust in the paths we take as we relentlessly name and pursue our truest desires, which, like the sun, pull us harmoniously and magically into our unique orbits. this trust is deeply radical because it requires us to carefully listen to, feel out, believe in, and follow whatever it is that magnetizes our spirits with passion and delight, without regard for what that path may look like to others from their points of view. as we pursue the paths that we know to be true to our higher, whole selves, we will often appear to outside observers to be moving backwards, spiraling away from the prescribed and pre-determined paths we “should” be taking, dancing uncomfortably wildly, writing our lives in an illegible script. the meaning of our motion may be inscrutable to many, and they may intentionally or unintentionally plant the seeds for shame to root and blossom in our chests. but in retrograde motion we find a call to follow the path which the luminous parts inside our enspirited bodies long to take. in this way, retrograde motion also reminds us that we are children of the cosmos, that the luminaries which dance in the heavens are also the parts which dance within our own spirits.

retrograde motion is a reminder, then, that we are children of earth and children of sky. it is an invitation to open our selves fully to the embodied, ecological mysteries of the earth below and the harmonious wonders of the sky above, letting their energies meet and intertwine wildly in our heart centers, as we reclaim our birthright of living here between earth and sky with hearts magically and wide open.