Giving Form to the Formless: Saturn’s Return to Pisces
I just emerged from my first pond swim of the season. Not technically a pond, this small body of water that irrigates our farm fields and gardens is actually just a widening and slowing of the stream that we briefly divert from the creek defining the little valley we live in.
The water in our creek comes from snowmelt off the high crest of the Siskiyou Mountains to the south, the view I orient myself towards no matter where I rest on this land.
As sky becomes clouds, and clouds transform into the snowy cap on Dutchman Peak, melting droplets collectively follow the path of least resistance to become the trickling headwaters of Yale Creek. Our home creek then travels a few adventurous miles down the valley to join the Little Applegate River as it widens toward the Applegate and, eventually, the Rogue River, which spills into the ocean in a wide way at Gold Beach on the Southern Oregon Coast.
As the waters once known as Elk, Bear, Applegate, and Illinois enter the sea there, they swirl and swim with currents that have traveled all the way from the icy Arctic and the shores of Japan with no way to tell which molecule of water came from what stream or glacier or pond. And it really doesn’t matter, because they all now bear the same the name: The Pacific Ocean.
This is the story of water held in the ever-widening hands of earth. It is the story of all the things water can become when there is something to contain it—a swimming hole, a cistern, lips meeting water in hands cupped beneath a mountain spring. It is the story of something that gives itself over to gravity without pause, transforming the landscape it moves through just as the everchanging landscape transforms it. It is the story of matter that can take all forms—-gas, liquid, solid, and many states in between—-and that always, always moves towards oneness no matter how hard we try to contain it. One ocean, one sky, the basis for life as we know it. This, my loves, is the story of Saturn in Pisces.
Every 29-ish years, Saturn completes it orbit around the sun and returns to the same constellation it was in nearly three decades earlier. Because our late-twenties, late fifties, and late-eighties mark significant thresholds in our adult development (full-on adulthood, early elderhood, and late elderhood), people have long associated Saturn with maturity and commitment. And as the farthest-out planet that people could see with the naked eye for most of human history, Saturn also represents boundaries, containers, and obstacles.
As the guiding planet for the sign of Capricorn, Saturn is associated with grounded earth energy. At its finest, Saturn has the vibe of a sturdy house foundation, one carved into the planet and solidified with concrete and lumber or stone. Saturn wants to help us build the home of our dreams, and it knows that the integrity of our house is dependent upon the quality of the foundation it is built upon. So wherever Saturn is in its journey through the Zodiac, we are collectively called to commit to create a solid base for the themes represented by the sign it occupies.
Traveling through Pisces from March 7, 2023 through May 24th, 2025, we are currently about halfway through Saturn’s two-year transit in Pisces’ fluid, expansive, unifying waters. Which means that right now, in this very moment, we are all being asked to commit to love, creativity, intuition, emotions, connection, imagination, compassion, wonder, awe, healing, and a sense of oneness with all things. We are being asked to bring the formless into form by creating appropriate containers for it. We are being asked to be the streambed, the lake basin, and the homemade ceramic mug to hold our grandest visions. We are being asked to find ways—-real, tangible ways—-to transform our ideals into action, our connection with the cosmos into daily practices, our creative visions into the fabric of our daily lives, and our wildest dreams into reality.
The dreamy, boundless part of us that wants to flow with no limitations may cringe at the idea of bringing practical Saturn into the picture with its penchant for spreadsheets and schedules, clocks and commitments. It may fear that Saturn’s boundaries will appear as a dam that blocks our flow and turns our watery goodness into something as stagnant and sad as Lake Mead.
Unchecked, it certainly can do that. And that’s exactly why it behooves us to consciously work with Saturn, to invite it in and put it to work in service of our slippery selves, so it doesn’t storm into our most sacred spaces and start bossing us around in the form of an internal critic or external obstacles.
And yet, when Saturn DOES appear in those guises, rather than duking it out or collapsing into a puddle of Picean shame, we have the choice to pause. To ask ourselves, “What is the well meaning intention of this internal or external voice? How is it trying to support me?” Because, even though its bedside manner can be unnecessarily coarse, Saturn wants nothing more than to help us build solid structures to support us on the next phase of our evolutionary journeys.
What does that mean for you right now? What wide, boundless, and expansive qualities would you like to connect with more regularly? What kind of practices, activities, and commitments can you create to do so? What kind of containers do your watery ways want to be held by?
Personally, my soul craves lots of time and space to be quiet and creative in nature. Around the beginning of Saturn’s transit through Pisces last year, I longed for more slowtime in the woods surrounding my home, so I started setting my alarm clock thirty minutes earlier, packing a backpack with a thermos of coffee, toast, a journal, and my Crazy Creek chair, and hiking out to different special spots on this land. Setting my alarm so early felt hard at first, but, a year later, it (usually) delights me. Because I know that it is exactly what I need to create space in my day for connecting with wonder, awe, and wild delight. I am grateful to my inner Saturn for creating a breakfast-picnic-shaped container for my longings.
To dive even more deeply into what this (or any) Saturn transit means for you, you can look at your birth chart. If you know your rising sign, you can see what house Pisces occupies in your chart. This will tell you more about the specific area of your life where you are being asked to learn, grow, commit, and give form to the formless. For example, as a Gemini Rising, Pisces is in my tenth house of career and public roles, which means that I am being asked to create containers for intuition, compassion, creativity, and connection in the context of my vocation.
And lo! This year I launched a new website, a landing spot (or foundation if you will) for folks who are looking for support on their evolutionary and healing journeys. As the work I do is all about helping others connect with their own fluid subconscious realms within a compassionate, creative, and connective container, it does seem that my life is mirroring the stories told by the planets and stars.
For folks who are now in their late twenties and early thirties, born between January 28, 1994 and April 7th, 1996, this transit has extra significance, for they are experiencing their first Saturn Returns. This phrase is so common that even people who have no affinity towards astrology use it to name the angsty time period when the exploratory freedoms of the late teens and early twenties start giving way to a desire for more stability, security, and an outlet for sharing personal gifts in a meaningful way.
That is, as Saturn makes its first return, most people begin to feel called to lay the foundation for the adult life they want to create for themselves. It feels like a big deal because it is. I mean, we can always change course, shift our focus, even lift up the whole house and fix the foundation, but if you can prevent yourself from committing to a life based on what you think your family or the culture wants for you and focus, instead, on creating the base you need to create the life of your dreams, you are laying the most important foundation of all: A dedication to your SELF. And the sign and house that Saturn is in in your birth chart may hold clues about what that commitment looks like.
I have a dear friend currently in the midst of his Saturn Returns. We recently drew tarot cards together. He asked about the studies he is pursuing to eventually become a therapist, and his card was the King of Cups. This card was balm for him as it lifted him from the confines of his academic focus (extreme Saturn vibes) toward the broader reminder of why he was in school in the first place: to become the King of Cups.
If there is ANY card in the tarot deck that reflects the beautiful ways that Saturn can contain water, it is this one.
The King of Cups is a gentle, healthily boundaried figure who represents the part of us that can hold the full range of emotions with a loving and secure presence. Because he has tools for grounding himself, he become a co-regulatory energy for others. He has dreams and creative visions, and he can bring them into reality because he is connected to his flesh and bone. His energy is a balance of yin and yang, inward and outward, receptive and giving, soft and sturdy.
And right now we have a entire collective of people in their late twenties and early thirties who are being called to commit their adult lives to the embodiment of this energy.
Let me say this again. We have a whole cohort of people born between 1994 and 1996 who are figuring out how to dedicate their adult lives to building structures that cultivate wonder, awe, creativity, emotional connection, love, healing, and intuition. Let’s help them by joining them now.
And it really doesn’t matter where Pisces appears in our chart to do so. Whether it’s the part of our lives that has to do with identity, finances, home life, or partnership, we can commit ourselves to embodying flow.
Because every time we create a container to hold love and expansiveness, more of it is generated and has nowhere to go but spilling into other areas our lives. After all, Pisces is pretty terrible with boundaries. It wants to be sky, snowflake, glacier, groundwater, mountain creek, raging river, Great Lake, Pacific Ocean, mist, fog, clouds, and sky all at once. And all we have to do is create beautiful, supportive containers to hold it, swim in it, and drink from it while we can, then set it free to flow again and again and again.
If you’d like to explore how Pisces appears for you or work with your first or second Saturn Returns, I’d love to work with you! You can book a reading here.
xoxo Becca
