The sky's elegance

I was reminded recently that learning astrology is hard. I’ve spent an insane amount of time pouring over charts, and it’s easy to lose perspective when you’ve been doing this for as long as I have. I think it’s simple, but when I have to back up and explain planets, signs, and houses and how they come together to form a cohesive narrative, then you add transits and progressions, I can understand why your head would start to spin.

It really helps when you personify planets and think of houses as venues, so astrology becomes more like playing a game of Clue: person, weapon, location (planet, type of aspect, houses involved). After a while, you learn where to direct your focus, and stuff starts to sound really familiar, like when the person with the Saturn transit starts complaining about being stressed or the person with the Neptune transit is overwhelmed or the person with the Pluto transit is pissed off. The only time I pay attention to the planets that are close to earth any more is when they're doing something weird.

What’s less fun is over time the sense of mystery, mysticism, and surprise wears off after confirming that, yes, astrology works well if you know what you’re doing. It becomes more like clockwork. The year that I learned seemed magical: I threw myself into it because I preferred not to focus on anything happening in my actual life at the time, and I was taking improv classes, so I had a whole bunch of stranger classmates to give free (bad!!!) readings to. But even when I was bad, I was apparently somewhat decent, because I blew a lot of people away (though I shake my head at what I probably said back then).

Sometimes people tell me I should write a book, but all I have is a zillion different stories and examples of how different transits play out for different people. Every day there’s a new story because I know where peoples’ energy is (relatively) and vaguely what their major transits are, but if someone asks I’ll look to see how close it is and advise. But look: every time you read a book by a different astrologer, they give you a slightly different definition of transits, because they have to do that to sell books. This is one way people wind up confused. I have Pluto square Pluto right now, and the variations in the description of the transit are mind-boggling, and I'm *used* to reading about transits. So I'd imagine it would be a lot if you were just learning. Part of it is learning from experience how things actually tend to go, as well.

A different way people wind up confused (and fucking terrified) is that not all transits mean all things. You can give yourself nightmares by reading ahead about what your upcoming transits portend, or you can wait for them to take shape and form and react to whatever it is that's happening. I do the former but I prefer the latter, because if you're always worried about incoming energy, you wind up living looking over your shoulder, wondering if there's an asteroid aimed directly at you, somehow.

A month ago or so, Chiron the planetoid was making a sextile aspect to my sun. I heard from a guy back then, and I gave him what he wanted/needed, and he went away. Now Chiron is retrograde and the aspect is almost exact and I got an email again from him this morning. Usually with aspects it's not the same person having the same conversation with you, but sometimes it is. The way this works, and it does work, is funny and beautiful (and sometimes irritating) all at once.