Children are little time eaters. They devour days and weeks and months with their adorable grins, eyes of wonder, and delight in the most ordinary of details. They enrapture you with their innocence and need. They steal your drive and rearrange your ambition and suddenly you are hell-bent on achieving one thing: getting them to smile at you. Or better, giggle. The ways in which I have hopped, jumped, wiggled, waggled, and buffooned my way across a room to get a chuckle.
Nothing has made me more acutely aware of time than having a child. Every single moment away from them is a precious pocket of potential where I can tend to my life, work, needs, and self — and at the same time, every single moment away from them is something I will miss. A new sound, or look, or laugh. God forbid, first steps.
But life still demands me.
A friend once told us that all time is borrowed time once you have children. I, of course, need and want to go do my own thing, live my life, go on the business trip, attend the event, etc. But it is now time that I’ve borrowed from being with them. And this is no ordinary time. It is time that is fleeting because they are still too young for school, worldly demands, and a social calendar of their own.
Time is now split in two. I am split in two all the time.
The astrological Lord of Time is Saturn. Agriculturally, Saturn can be thought of as the reaper of seeds sown. We can think of transits (a specific amount of time when a planet is doing something impactful to our personal charts or the collective astrological moment) from Saturn as master classes in time management. Often seen with a scythe, Saturn tells us what we need to cut, what we need to get clear about, what to prioritize, and how. If we intend to be serious people, that is.
If you want to get something done, or if you want to rest, or if you want to create, or if you want to manifest anything into being, Saturn is your madame. Saturn demands that we set aside time. It says: “If you really want it, what do you need to say no to in order to have it?”
I have been in a major Saturn transit since this little love nugget entered the scene. Saturn has been in a hard aspect (this is astro speak for a conjunction, a square, or an opposition) to the ruler of my ascendant (aka the planet that steers the direction of my life). All that to say, since March of 2023, when Saturn entered Pisces, I’ve been under construction. When the ruler of your ascendant gets transited (you can check the CHANI app to find the ruler of your ascendant and see if it’s receiving any transits), it’s akin to a detour, refinement, or reordering. With Saturn, there is also an emphasis on restraint, maturity, rules, scarcity, integrity, delayed gratification, disillusionment, and mastery. Saturn reminds us that there truly are no shortcuts, and under its influence, we are immediately held accountable for all of our choices and actions.
Saturn is nothing if not a cold-plunge reality check.
Anyone who has any planet (especially the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn) or point (especially their ascendant, midheaven, descendant, or IC) in a mutable sign (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, or Pisces) has felt or will soon feel the same weight of this moment. I highly recommend checking the Transit tab of the CHANI app to see if you are under such an influence personally. And if you have something important in Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, or Pisces but you don’t yet see the transit, don’t worry — you will. Saturn has been slowly going over the same few early degrees of Pisces (Goddess help me) for nearly a year. So if it’s yet to really come for you, know that it’s on its way.
Collectively speaking, however, we’ll all be under Saturn’s influence over the next couple of weeks. Its lessons loom formidable thanks to a pileup of planets in close proximity to it. On Saturday, February 24th, the Full Moon in Virgo will sit opposite the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn in Pisces — and the week after, on Wednesday, February 28th, the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn will all come together for a rare triple conjunction. In other words: The next two weeks will be a crash course in clarification. Let this moment coach you on getting exceptionally focused on what it is you want to bring into being, and all that you’ll need to reject in order to do so.
This is not the time to revel in our delusion.
Saturn teaches us that to be disillusioned is to be set free. To know reality is to be able to work miracles. To be clear is the only place from which we can be kind and in our power.
Dr. Gabor Maté recently said: “Would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned? Would you rather have illusions about the world or see things as they are? … To get disillusioned is actually a good thing. The problem with a lot of people in this world, Jews included, is that they identify with something, and when that something then comes under scrutiny, they feel personally attacked. Now, to identify with something comes from the Latin word idem, which means ‘the same’ and facera, ‘to make.’ So when you identify, you make yourself the same as something else. So if I identify with Israel as the Jewish state, when Israel is criticized, I am criticized personally. … So what I am saying to people is don’t be afraid to be disillusioned. It’s better to be disillusioned than illusioned. Don’t be afraid to be dis-identified. Don’t identify with something outside of yourself to the extent that you become uncritical.”
It’s not lost on me that I have the privilege to write about time with my child, in a city that isn’t being bombed, with my tax dollars funding the massacre of children in a place that I’ve been told my whole life is mine simply because I am Jewish. It’s a reality that stalks me endlessly. Palestinian families deserve to be worried about each other in such simple and basic ways as I have written about here. They deserve childhoods, parenthood, grandparenthood, auntiehood, time at the park, the ability to live and grow and thrive. Instead, they are saddled with the ongoing and unimaginable atrocities of a violent colonial and criminal occupation — the same type of supremacy that has dominated every Indigenous population for centuries.
The reality of the situation is this: We should do something, anything that we can, to bring about an immediate and permanent ceasefire because it is the only humane thing to do. But we can be certain of this too: If we idly watch a genocide occur, we are sure to one day watch our own. In fact, if we are complacent at this moment, we will continue to witness the death of our own humanity. This is the cold-plunge reality check we need to face right now. It’s past time to realize that doesn’t have to be our future.
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