“What journey would you say you’re on?” asked my therapist.
I’d spent the first 40 minutes of my appointment monologuing about the various relationship breakups and breakdowns I’ve experienced over the past year and tbh on constant repeat throughout my whole life. The pattern is clear and over the past six months in therapy, I’ve stumbled through the labyrinthine narrative of these relationships, attempting to clear a path in the overgrown woods toward its origins.
“That’s a good question,” I said before launching into another five minute ramble on the distinction between the chaos of the past and the peace I want in the future.
“In everything you’ve said to me in our time together, it seems that you’re on a journey toward, for lack of a better word…quiet.”
I’d been waiting for this kind of truth to drop this week, as the Sun, Mercury and Saturn form a rare triple conjunction at 9º Pisces, going exact on February 28.
Austin Coppock calls the first decan of Pisces—where Saturn has been traveling for a year now, and where my chart ruler Venus resides—The Labyrinth. He describes it as a geography where one crawls in the darkness, seeking the exit to an escape room that was actually self constructed. The vibe is: going home. But also, where is this home? It’s a place where we realize in both horror and relief that the definition is up to us, that the point isn’t to helplessly grope for the truth, but to acknowledge that we’re inside a reality of our construction. It’s dark. We can turn the lights on ourselves.
Turning the lights on myself, I could see the winding path I’d taken on my own journey to turn down the volume. To find peace and quiet. One could say I’ve been on this journey my whole life. Perhaps it’s my labyrinth to bear. I understand why many of my astrologer colleagues choose to live out in the woods or desert, away from the chaos of city life. My flippant move to LA during my Saturn Return was in part an attempt to blow the speakers and permanently cut the sound of my 20’s. My obsession with Survivor is in part about my own desire to be stranded on an island for a month without my phone. My word for 2024 is Peace. But until this week, I’d never turned up the lights to acknowledge that what I desire isn’t Silence. It’s not quiet I want. As my therapist said, it’s “for lack of a better word…” Because I, myself, am actually quite loud. I was a theater kid. I can easily project to the back of the room. I gesture broadly. I enjoy doing karaoke. For a long time, I’ve put myself in a prison of seeking an impossible silence, one that will always be interrupted. What I actually desire is a place where I’m allowed to take up all the space and volume that I want. David and I have an inside joke where we go “Shhhhhh!” after dropping an explicit truth (a gesture lovingly stolen from an old restaurant coworker of mine). When I say quiet, what I really mean is space.
Ask anyone with Pisces placements (myself included), and they’ll tell you carving out your own space, making your own shape, is an impossible task. Coppock writes of Pisces I, “the realization transforms the structure itself from a prison to a palace. Liberation is achieved through insight alone.” The point isn’t to resolve, but to recognize.
Here I am recognizing it.
A song that might capture the whole Pisces I thing is Frankie Cosmos’ “Abigail,” a song from the 2022 album Inner World Peace. This song comes up relentlessly on my Spotify shuffle. I used to religiously listen to Frankie Cosmos but haven’t since the peak of my Saturn Return in 2019, some other time I’ll write about how some music is for always, and some music is for transit. But I didn’t really listen to the lyrics until today:
I'm just trying to know
What I wanna die surrounded by
Of all the books I'm halfway through
I could build a staircase up to you
Half a memory is tugging at me
Abigail, I want you to be alive with me
Almost one year ago, on March 7, 2023, Saturn entered Pisces. After spending five years in his home signs of Capricorn and Aquarius, the collective move was toward something less rigid and more technicolor. At the time I compared this shift to Dorothy’s entrance to Oz, and Mad Men’s Season 5 fade into the psychedelic part of the1960’s. Some of us embraced this transition with pure awe while others felt stuck and uncomfortable. Exhaustion pervaded either way. When do you recover when life is always one strange trip to another. “There’s always something.”
Saturn spent the entirety of the last year in the first decan of Pisces. And I know I’m not alone in saying that it put all of us through the wringer. But this isn’t the same kind of hard nosed wringer we went through while Saturn was in Capricorn Aquarius, especially in 2022. 2022 is when Saturn worked his way through Aquarius III, the decan Coppock calls The Knot, where earlier this month (February 9), we experienced the New Moon in Aquarius. It’s a place where what we don’t sever, we must commit to untangling. Every messy inch. It’s only now, that Saturn has reached the end of Pisces I, that I’m able to see how deeply tangled those Knot times were. Saturn in Aquarius III was a time of clearing space, and within that space, one could find so many (cold, desolate) places to hide. Saturn’s last year in Pisces was a shout of “come out, come out wherever you are.” A shuffle to the uncomfortable present.
Pisces I is a cold plunge into both freedom and pain. An image that illustrates this perfectly is in the final scene of Succession. Kendall Roy in Battery Park, flanked by his father’s body guard, looking out into the abyss. Nothing to get caught up in anymore. Just vibes. Succession premiered in June 2018, a few months after Saturn entered Capricorn. The series, which tells the story of a dysfunctional media empire family’s power struggle. Who will inherit the firm and stay stuck in the prison of power? Who will win? (The answer is obvious from the start, none of them will win). The first three seasons aired while Saturn was in Capricorn and Aquarius, and deftly portray the starkness of Saturn in domicile, from the color palette to the rigid costuming to the choppy corporate jargon they all speak (“Uh huh.”) The fourth and final season premiered on March 26, 2023, just after Saturn entered Pisces, and from the jump it’s clear in this season that the characters are no longer climbing the corporate ladder, but (often literally) swimming in the void. Succession concludes with the Roy family left with their version of nothing. Still wealthy and fine, they’re left to ponder what they were so caught up in this whole time. When the fight to untangle ends, the real work begins. Kendall Roy in particular, spent his entire life folding himself into a perfect little pretzel. And for what? Or maybe the question is, Now what?
Sometimes the knots we tire ourselves up in are necessary, but so often they’re a distraction. For a year now, there’s been nowhere left to hide. Call it rock bottom. Call it disillusionment. Call it a hail mary. The pain of Pisces I though isn’t one of escapism. It’s the pain of attuning to the truth of what we’re actually working with, what’s actually possible.
“It’s a place where much will be left behind, for the expectations we enter this phase with are not those that we will leave with,” writes Coppock. As the Sun, Mercury and Saturn all meet up in Pisces I on February 28, just after the Full Moon in Virgo on February 24 that also illuminated this part of the zodiac, there’s not a conclusion here, but a button on a conversation that keeps going.
In order to better reflect on your own serpentine journey over the last year, here are some important checkpoints to consider:
March 7, 2023: Saturn enters Pisces
June 17, 2023: Saturn stations retrograde at 7º Pisces
July 20, 2023: Mars in Virgo opposes Saturn at 6º Pisces
August 30, 2023: Full Moon at 7º Pisces conjunct Saturn
November 4, 2023: Saturn stations direct at 0º Pisces
November 24, 2023: Mars square Saturn at 0º Pisces
February 24, 2023: Full Moon in Virgo opposite Saturn
On March 1, Saturn will reach 10º of Pisces, and enter the next decan of the mutable water sign. Pisces II is associated with Tarot’s 9 of Cups. The Golden Dawn called this card Happiness. If the goal in Pisces I was to gain insight and face the truth, the goal in Pisces II is to build a bridge between here and there, and to find satisfaction in the process.
To put my own button on this conversation, here’s a poem I wrote in 2017, an entire Saturn square ago. It’s a different articulation I had for the lifelong search for space, shape and quiet.
I love citrus
I love collaging
I love how I feel
after I eat edamame.
I love miso on anything,
and apple cider vinegar.
I love dipping my hands
into a calm body of water.
I like quiet.
I’d like you to be quiet.
We’ll both love to be quiet
when we kiss.
or when we make a vinaigrette.
A vinaigrette kiss at the lake.
Paint me a poem.
Make it green.
Spin me like ceramics.
We’re the sea.
Walls are nice.
We paint them.
We lean on them.
but they never lean on us.
Bowls hold us.
All my life,
I’ve been looking for a wall
when I needed a bowl.
Books are open for March — excited to see Pisces and Aries for their Solar Return, new clients, old clients, and those who want to get calibrated during their ongoing Saturn Return.
Get caught up on your weekly forecast—this week was episode 50 of good fortune!
always fire - thank you for helping me locate myself / turn a little more kindly towards the monsters in my labyrinth haha
Lovely. I’ve just been trying to articulate something like this, as I go through the wringer again! Thank you ❤️🩹- Pisces in 10H with Saturn sq Asc.