The Death Card

“The thing that most surprised me about getting engaged was the grief,” a friend recently shared with me. “I had to mourn all of the lives I wouldn’t get to live in this lifetime. I love my husband and I wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else,” she continued, “but still it hit me—the commitment. It wasn’t just to him, but to a life with him and all that entails.”Whenever we take a major life step—get married, get divorced, have a child, embark on a new career, advance a continuing one—we are committing not only to that person or thing, but to ourselves, to our beliefs and, ultimately, to our future. Yet to take one road often means we must sacrifice another. The Death Card is what all of this represents-- not a physical death, but all types of transformation.When Saturn was in Scorpio, we learned about merged resources—sexual, financial, emotional. And with Saturn now in Sagittarius, we are learning the inherent limit on our freedom given our entanglements. It’s a necessary step in our maturation. I mean don’t we all, as Bob Dylan famously crooned, have to serve somebody? Isn’t adulthood about finding a balance between our responsibilities and our thirst for adventure? How do we accomplish that? How do we reconcile this in an age with so much possibility?I think, first, we must be ruthlessly honest with ourselves. We may be limitless, but we still have bodies. We’re still grounded on this earth at this time and this place. We can’t be everywhere. And even if we could, why would we want to, FOMO aside? And isn’t it true that to be everywhere is to be nowhere? We find ourselves forever scrambling after the next thing, only to realize we haven’t moved an inch. Growth, I think, requires a container. We need to be pushed and stretched. We need boundaries, something to come up against. We need limits.And so maybe freedom, as it turns out, is really just a state of mind. It’s not about the desired accumulation of stuff or astral projecting (however fantastic that may be) or being able to jump every enticing potential sexual and romantic partner. Rather, it’s about the expansion of the heart, the ability to gain a higher perspective, to see beyond the mundane, the petty and the futile, to find the wisdom inherent in our journey. Ultimately, it’s about being able to create meaning out of our experiences.We’ve battled our demons with Saturn in Scorpio, we’ve learned the depths of our engagement, and to what and to whom we are bonded. And now with Saturn in Sagittarius we are ready to solidify our faith—to make sense of our choices, where they’ve led us from and where they’re leading us to.Saturn will be in Sagittarius until December 19, 2017.