The book Laced With Magic by Barbara Bretton has a very LITERAL Saturn return. I don't know when Chloe's birthday is exactly (I don't recall it being mentioned in the books?), but she's around thirty and Saturn cycles feature in PROMINENTLY in the tale.
Just wanted to point that out.
It was pointed out to me that Julie Powell started her infamous Julie/Julia blog when she was 29-about-to-turn-30. Now that's an awesome use of Saturn Return.
I got ahold of her book this weekend (am slowly going through the blog, pretty slowly since I am not a foodie) and found some good quotes.
"But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to a lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep.
Oh God. It really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary.
When I looked up from MtAoFC for the first time, half an hour after I opened it, I realized that deep down, I'd been resigned to being a secretary for months--maybe even years.
That was the bad news. The good news was that the buzzing in my head and queasy but somehow exhilarating squeeze deep in my belly were reminding me that I might still, after all, be something else.""When I thought back to the days Before the Project, I remembered crying on subways, I remembered cubicles, I remembered doctor's appointments and something looming, something with a zero at the end of it. I remembered the feeling of wandering down an endless hallway lined with locked doors. Then I turned a knob that gave under my fingers, everything went dark, and when I came to again, I was chortling away at midnight at a stove in a bright kitchen, sticky with butter and sweat. I wasn't a different person, exactly, just the same person plunked down into some alternate, Julia Child-centric universe. I didn't remember the moment of transition--I expect that wormholes do funny things to the memory--but there was no question I was in a different place. The old universe had been subjugated under the tyranny of entropy. There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse, the laws of thermodynamics had been turned on their heads."
"But I couldn't quit. I couldn't quit because if I wasn't cooking, I wouldn't be the creator of the Julie/Julia project anymore. I'd just have my job, and my husband, and my cats. I'd be just the person I was before. Without the Project I was nothing but a secretary on the road to nowhere, drifting towards frosted hair and menthol addiction."
(note: this is after Julie tells the story of getting a call at work from a woman running an S&M dungeon!)
"He meant that sometimes you get a glimpse into a life that you never thought of before. There are hidden trap doors all over the place, and suddenly you see one, and the next thing you know you're flogging grateful businessmen or chopping lobsters in half, and the world's just so much bigger than you thought it was.
So that night I made my New Year's resolution, better late than never: To Get Over My Damned Self. If I was going to follow Julia down this rabbit hole, I was going to enjoy it, by God--exhaustion, crustacean murder, and all. Because not everybody gets a rabbit hole. I was one lucky bastard, when you came down to it.""What was I, the woman with the plan? It was not exactly as if I told my friends and family, "Hey, I'm going to cook my way through an old French cookbook, and when it's done, I'll have figured out what to do with the rest of my life," and they all just sat back with a sigh of relief, thinking, Well, I'm so glad Julie has got it all figured out. Sensible girl, that Julie.
Who was I to judge somebody else's navigation?"
(after Julia C dies)
"I knew I had to write something on my blog, even though I hadn't been writing on it for months and months. I knew people would come looking to see if I had anything to say. I wanted to write Julia the best, funniest, greatest in memoriam ever. I got to work on it, and I was on fire, let me tell you. I had funny, touching insights. I was coming off clever and heartfelt and sad and grateful and joyful. I was on a roll.
And then I wrote this sentence: "I have no claim over the woman at all, unless it's the claim one who has nearly drowned has over the person who pulled her out of the ocean."
And I started crying so hard I had to stop writing.
Two years ago I was a twenty-nine-year-old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one-year-old writer who gets paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me--I certainly would."
(I read this to my mother and she said, "You should have a job like that.")"Overall, life is pretty good. I mean, it's not my own enlightened sheikdom, but it sure doesn't suck.
And it's all because of Julia.
I'm not saying this just because blogging about her was what got me the fifteen minutes of fame I was then able to parlay into what's so far looking like maybe (knock wood) a permanent respite from temp work....Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It's not what I thought it was all about--I don't know, confidence or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there's something else, something that these things grow out of.
It's joy....I read her instructions for making bechamel sauce, and what comes throbbing through is that here is a woman who has found her way.
Julia Child began learning to cook because she wanted to share good food with her husband, because she'd fallen in love with great food late but hard, because she was in Paris, because she didn't know what else to do with herself. She was thirty-seven years old. She'd found love, and it was divine. She'd learned to eat, and that was pretty great, too. But it wasn't enough. She probably never thought she'd find whatever it was that was missing if she hadn't found it by the age of thirty-seven. But then, at a cooking school in Paris, she did.""Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason. Julia taught me that."
According to the blog, her birthday is April 20 (oh, ugh, a cusper, could go either way). Mercury in Aries, Venus in Taurus conjunct Sun, moon and Neptune conjunct in Sadge, Mars and Jupiter in Aquarius, North Node in Capricorn (work is her goal...well, certainly the case here), grand air trine with Uranus, Saturn, and Mars.
For comparison's sake, a writeup of Julia and Paul Child. I'm amused that he cites her wacky voice on Uranus quincunx Mercury--I've got that and my voice isn't that strange (other than I laugh like Mozart).
So, my Pisces Moon mom has just been totally effing crazy all last week, and Teh Crazy is continuing this week. Alas, she has to use up her vacation time this week, so she is spending it calling me at work wanting to cry and go over drama (thanks, Mom), AND she can't find anyone who wants to hang out with her in this mood. Can't imagine why.
So, astrology: just coming out of an exact Saturn Return again for her, transiting Pluto square her natal Venus, nearing the end of Uranus through her seventh house. Progressed moon in seventh (trining Saturn for awhile) and she is screaming for a partner and nobody's giving it to her. Whee.
Then I get e-mail from my Pisces Moon BF, so I analyzed her tarot reading. Moral of the story: COOL IT WITH THE EMOTIONS, 'CAUSE THEY ARE MAKING YOU CRAZY AND YOU GET NOTHING DONE.
Her astrology: progressed moon in seventh, progressed Pluto/Venus/Sun trine and Mars opposed to Pluto.
I am so the person with No Sympathy For Your Pain this week.
So it has proved with Jack over the last long 18 months, as Saturn passed by his Sun/Moon/Saturn conjunction. (*4) 2004 was, according to him, ‘the best year of my life’, the year of the reputation-establishing Elephant, of a serious love affair with Renee Zellweger, and a collaboration with a hallowed elder, Loretta Lynn, which won him a Grammy award.
Yet with Saturn, little comes easily; huge work has been called for, while Saturn’s association with authority has seen Jack in court case after his fight with Stollheimer. It was, according to Jack, ‘the year we found out who our friends were’.
Jack’s testing 18 months of Saturn has finished with him allegedly getting married to Karen Elson.
Another Saturn Return story, but much less with the answers and much more with the panic so far.
Again from reading Rolling Stone (though this article isn't online at all), I found an article on Conor Oberst and how he was making musical changes in his life.
Interesting stuff."Oberst clearly grappled with the transitional period referenced in that album's liner notes: when "mighty Saturn enters your eighth house"--the late-20's threshold between youth and adulthood, when friendships die and beliefs change. He stopped recording for the label he co-founded, Saddle Creek. He broke up with his longtime girlfriend, singer-songwriter Maria Taylor. (He remains single.) He even decided to retire the name Bright Eyes, his main musical identity since age 18. "It's such a big part of my life," he says. "But it does feel like it needs to stop at some point," which he plans to achieve with one final record. "I'd like to clean it up, lock the door, say goodbye."
After untethering himself from so many things at once, Oberst felt adrift. "I didn't want to go to Omaha, didn't want to go to New York, didn't want to be around anything that I'd known before," he says. "The idea of going to another universe sounded fantastic to me." So last year, Oberst traveled to the Mexican mountainside village of Tepoztlan, in the Valle Mistico, which he first heard about after a tour stop in Mexico City. Known for its UFO sightings and huge Aztec pyramid and as the birthplace of the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, the place seemed to offer solace and restoration. "It's a magical, magical place," Oberst says. "If you go down to the Pyramid of the Sun, climb that thing and stare out--it's hard not to feel something. To me, that Native American idea that you can see the reflection of everything in nature and in each other seems really true."
Oberst chose this valley to open a new musical chapter in his life. He found an adobe building and had instruments and a special 16-track recorder brought in. "I really wanted this particular machine that M. Ward records on," says Oberst. "It's like this magical, supermellow sound, like a warm old quilt." Then he called some friends: Bright Eyes keyboardist-arranger Nathaniel Walcott, Rilo Kiley drummer Jason Boesel, bassist Macey Taylor, Thrasher photographer-turned-singer-songwriter Nik Freitas and Taylor's friend from Birmingham, Alabama, guiltarist Taylor Hollingsworth. Together in the adobe cabin, this group--soon to be dubbed the Mystic Valley Band--cut the 2008 disc Conor Oberst, his first record since he was 16 not credited to Bright Eyes."
I can't believe I've never mentioned this book on here, but according to the searches I really haven't. Bizarre. So here you go.
(Astrology note: Mary's horoscope is impossible. It's oddly similar to mine, and there's no way the girl is a Scorpio Sun with Mercury in Aries. I'm inclined to think the original chart they worked off of/fudged was a Taurean chart, or at least on the Aries/Taurus/Gemini side of the zodiac!)
As Mary Forrest turns 29, she goes to see an Indian astrologer, who tells her of the SR and says stuff like "You have to kill your father." Well, Mary's is dead, so this is gonna be more in the metaphorical sense.
In Mary's case, her SR has the following events:
Okay, wacky idea, but I figured it might be a good one to mention characters who relate to this topic.
The setup: Maxi Amberville is 29 years old at the start of the novel. She's spent almost her entire life as a charming party girl, the sort who gets voted class president just before she gets expelled. She's held one job in her life as an intern for one of her father's magazines (he has a magazine publishing company), which she was a total dilettante about ("Lunch! Three free hours to shop!") until a hunky fellow named Rocco was hired. Maxi immediately became the world's most helpful assistant to him, and later ended up marrying him/having his kid before the marriage blew up after about a year. Since then she's been divorced two more times after impulsively marrying two other blokes. Her second husband, known as Bad Dennis Brady, well...it's a good thing he inherited money, because he had no interests other than boating, gambling, and boinking. Maxi got fed up with his lack of ambition and then ended up marrying a guy with ambition...only he was kind of nuts and his ambition had more to do with the past than anything else. So, basically, she's gotten married a few times, raised a kid, and shopped a lot. Her goal in life is the Search for the Ultimate Fun.
Then Maxi finds out that her evil uncle Cutter has just married her widowed mother (yes, this is partly a retelling of Hamlet, but with less deaths) and taken over the family company. Which he means to destroy. None of Toby Amberville's kids showed interest in taking over the biz in the first place (Maxi was partying, Justin was roaming the world, and Toby is legally blind), so you'd think nobody would care if he starts cutting corners, right? Well, Maxi, who was her daddy's favorite, pitches a fit and demands control of one of the to-be-axed magazines. She picks "Buttons and Bows", the first magazine her dad ever founded, on a whim. It seems like a pretty stupid whim when she goes down to the place and finds it pretty well dead already.
So Maxi decides to create a new magazine on top of the old one. She buys every magazine she can find on the stands, reads them all, and gets vastly furious with the "shame, shame, you're not good enough" messages of every dang women's magazine out there. (AMEN TO THAT.) Her magazine idea then becomes "B&B, the magazine that loves you." It's all about fun. Reusing stuff in your closet, amusing celebrity confessionals, and no shaming and guilting! Much to her surprise, Maxi finds that the Ultimate Fun is...work. Who knew?
Maxi's birthday isn't outright stated in the book, but it's indicated to be in August. No way in hell is she a Virgo, so clearly she's a showboat Leo kinda girl.