Awakening, Epiphany, and a Joyous Denouement
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In two classic tales of the Capricorn season, A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, protagonists in crisis review their lives and experience life-changing epiphanies. Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey are two sides of the same coin – one miserly, one compassionate and caring. Each takes a journey through fear, sadness, and grim circumstances, but those are not the parts of the stories that touch me. What makes me cry, every time, is the joy each character experiences in the moment he awakens from a tortured dream state and embraces life with a wide-open heart.
What is it about joy that makes us weep? I suppose it’s that joy opens us up, while tragedy puts us into a tight, protective, fetal position. When we open ourselves to joy, we open ourselves to everything, tears included. And so the trust required to open up is like the trust of a couple who take vows of marriage while onlookers cry.
Joy is a commodity that seems to be in short supply these days. I’m struggling as much as anyone with this heavy, Saturn/Pluto/South Node flotsam. I’m working far too many hours. I’m missing one cat, who died last month, and spending a lot of time trying to keep the other one comfortable in his geriatric twilight. My family is too far away, and my best friend may be moving to another city next year. And to be honest, I’m feeling kind of old.
With my second Saturn return two months away, I’m taking stock of the past twenty-nine years and feel as though I’m limping to the finish line. Like George Bailey, I feel a lack of worldly success, that my reach has been too small and that my house is too full of newel post finials that fall off in your hand as you walk up the stairs. Like Scrooge, I regret that my work and ambition have taken priority over my relationships. I’m in a fever dream of ghosts from the past, fears for the future, and disappointment in the present.
D on’t take me too seriously; all of these feelings are to be expected, at Saturn return time. But they’re compounded by Capricorn’s season of short, cold days– particularly this year, with a Solar Eclipse in the sign, and on Christmas Day, no less (bah! humbug!). And if anything perfectly illustrates an eclipse in Capricorn – or for those around the ages of 29 and 58, the Saturn return – it’s the stories of Ebenezer and George, whom crisis brings to a better understanding of their place in their communities and in the world. And this week’s celestial lineup perfectly mimics that narrative.
A day before the eclipse, the Sun in Capricorn forms a trine to Uranus (Dec. 24, 1:43 pm PST), the planet of awakening. As for Scrooge and George Baily, some unexpected development – like George’s financial troubles, or Scrooge’s visit from Marley’s ghost – jolts us into awareness of the ways in which we’ve held ourselves back from happiness. The Solar Eclipse itself (Dec. 25, 9;13 pm PST) marks both characters’ fraught nights of hallucinations. And two days later, the Sun joins with Jupiter (Dec. 27, 10:25 am PST) – signalling the joyous denouement, Scrooge’s Christmas Day turkey delivery to the Cratchits, George Bailey’s friends organizing a 1940s-style GoFundMe and proclaiming him the richest man in town.
Seen from the approaching Saturn/Pluto conjunction and the Moon’s South Node in Capricorn, the world has seemed increasingly sad and scared and brutish in recent years, and it’s easy to despair of doing much to improve upon it. It’s been the fashion, in the year and a half of the South Node in Capricorn, to clasp disappointment and cynicism to our chests in the misguided belief that doing so will inoculate us from feeling more of the same.
But my friends, the North Node in Cancer offers a view, however distant, of redemption. Startled awake, we need only open our hearts to joy and closeness, caring and tenderness, to liberate ourselves from the narrowness of sorrow and regret. This simple formula isn’t easy to follow, in practice – but it’s not so easy, either, to hold ourselves rigid and fearful, trapped in prisons of our own making. That’s why we should welcome eclipses – they shift the direction of our personal narratives toward change, joy, and a good cry, whether or not we thought we were ready for it.
This week on the podcast, Jen and I review the eclipse as it affects each house and planet of the horoscope. And to learn more about eclipses in your birth chart, order my report, Followed by a Moonshadow!
© 2019 by April Elliott Kent
