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Stepping Through the Threshold; Through the Gates of Hades

Updated: Mar 3

*Being mindful, there is mention of SA within this share.


In my own process, Pisces season has very much felt like a void space. I've felt this change coming on for months, the early inklings of which started in the midst of Capricorn season, as I approached my solar return. Feeling this energy of swimming in the darkness, upward, reaching out to the pinprick of light at the surface. Slowly growing, ever so slowly. If the mind has taken hold, sometimes a feeling of drowning as my lungs restrict while that first breath creeps that much closer. I wrote in December about an experience of this liminal space, of waking and feeling like my surroundings were unfamiliar to me, having just transitioned from an inbetween state in a space that felt so tangible.


Aquarius season brought the start of an unrelenting anxiety. Bringing me back to my late teens and mid twenties, times when I felt myself crumbling to the floor, nauseous with energy, with thought. An inability to calm it. This revisiting of that old panic brought forth many feelings of failure. Of stepping backward in time. It took a month of this to be reminded that our processes are cyclical. When the time is correct to, we must revisit our old struggles in order to clear them. A deeper layer becomes exposed so that we may find resolve for these old patterns of behavior, of these old reactions.


Cannon Beach, Oregon; 2018

Memories have plagued me in these last several months. Old memories coming forward to greet me, to offer new reflection of what I'd never been able to see before. For some time now, I've been grieving what I can now see with passenger conciousness, as the witness. New awareness of how my body has attempted to communicate with me throughout my life. Emotion flooding me as I move through this process of letting go of what could not be accessed in those moments of experience, of those memories that serve as integrative lessons in retrospect. But also, now, I recieve reflections of the change and growth I've found over these last several years. I see it. I wrote sometime in the last week, 'I'm proud of myself.' And, maybe for the first time in my life, I do feel proud of myself, of how far I've come.


Diana Rose Harper offered me indirect reflection, recently, of the Saturn sextile, and pointed out the consideration of the planetary rulers of each phase in this cycle. I had the space to look back on the themes that have been ever present for me throughout this process. Witnessing the way in which the closing sextile was ruled by a 12th house Mars. The way I was in a 12th house year during that time. The pain of my experiences then, introduction to the way my hopeful, romantic rose-colored glasses have harmed me. The way blind faith in others allowed me to let those people who could only offer me harm in. And while it lessened over time, it continued. And each year subsequent it would continue to lessen, or merely shift expression.


The Waves at Dusk; Cannon Beach 2018

I spent my 7th house Saturn return escaping. I think I'd lost my mind early on, a complete mental breakdown, the peak of my struggles with anxiety and depression. I had started seeing a therapist for individual therapy for the first time right around my birthday that year, nearly three months into Saturn's return to Capricorn. We talked extensively on what, in my life, felt so overwhelming- everything. And one day I came in for an appointment and said I'd left the house I couldn't feel at home in, the partner who refused to commit, the job I didn't feel supported in. It was like I lit a match and set everything ablaze. And then one day, not much later, I left. I left everything I knew with a couple of pennies in my bank account to work out west on a boat.


I took that opportunity to go inward. I took my focus off of others and into myself. I found major break throughs that year in spite of the incredibly long hours spent working. I found spaces in the breaks to connect to myself in a way I never had, through journaling daily, through allowing myself to cry, to feel, to truly release the pent up emotion and grief I'd burried inside for much of my life. And that following year was the first year I think I'd ever found happiness- genuine, independantly sought happiness. But after eleven months of focusing all of my attention on myself, I would go back to attempting to find partnership, and would find myself revisiting, to a lesser degree, versions of similar boundary crossing that I found myself meeting through that closing sextile of Saturn, time and time again. Something clicked in me somewhere along the line, as I dipped my toes into the murky waters of an old partner, that his inability to commit to something while continually pushing his way back into my life was something I hadn't consented to. That I had been clear on what my desires were, and still, I had allowed him to cross that boundary time and time again, in hopes that something would change, the same way I, in a previous lifetime, had allowed myself to continue seeing the individual who assaulted me in my twenties in hopes that I would be loved eventually.

It has been interesting to consider the overlapping of various transits and processes all converging to tell this story. The way Pluto has been moving through my 7th house for the last 14 years, the entirety of my time in the world of dating. Now, culminating this month, as Saturn moves into my 9th house for my opening sextile, and Pluto prepares to move into my 8th house while it sits, in what feels like near stillness, directly atop my own natal Saturn at this anaretic degree.

There is a building energy here. Like I'm being tossed around in the tide, seeing hope as the surface break nears, and sudden despair as I find myself thrown backward, disoriented, a feeling of drowning in this deep, dark hole as I try to find my correct orientation again. Inching my way closer with each day, no matter how it looks in the moment.


To circle back, it feels as if this season has been a stepping into the void, just before stepping through a doorway into a new world. One I've been preparing a decade and a half, maybe even my whole life, for. I've gained so much from these last several years, and now it's time to dig even deeper, to refine what is, to put form to the formless. And it's funny to consider, as we enter the third decan of Pisces, a decan ruled by Mars, that it is represented by a cup of blood, as Austin Coppock writes in 36 Faces. It is the death required for rebirth, the end necessary for the new beginning. And it feels this way, this void space. It feels like things are being stripped away from me, things are truly being released, both, slowly and suddenly, and preparing me to take that next step. A leap into this new world that has already been offering me glimpses in my peripherals. A newness just around the corner. And just as the South Node, in Human Design, has been activating the channel of struggle in my own chart, this third decan of Pisces asks us, "What is worth fighting for?" As Coppock continues, "the third face unfolds as the quest for true and perfect love. Yet such stories, especially when told by the world, do not always have happy endings. A willingness to sacrifice everything is necessary, but not sufficient. One must have an ideal or a love worth sacrificing for."

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