She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess―Helen Oyeyemi.
“Be yourself” we’re told as we muster our confidence and bravely step out of the shadows. Yet as e.e. cummings once said, “the hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be someone else.” In these uneasy times of uncompromising nationalism, polarised ideologies, changing boundaries, displacement, gender rulings, increasingly we may ask—who are we, how independent is our will?
Novelist Virginia Woolf believed that there are a great variety of selves to call upon… “far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand…and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand…”
On May 24th, just before a buoyant new moon in Gemini (May 27th), Saturn moves into the sign of Aries, marking the beginning of a three-year journey that will touch all our lives in some way. Autonomy and identity will be the nucleus of Saturn’s transit through Aries. For some of us, this may be the exhilarating fresh start of everything we have been waiting for. We may finally have the courage to stop tip-toeing around people or situations that keep us small, to emerge unapologetically, as a new me.
Aries is the hero/warrior archetype, and its shadow, the destroyer. In myth and in fairy tale, the hero/warrior archetype is typically masculine. As the bedrock of our civilization shifts and cracks, revealing a new landscape, we imagine new myths, seek out new heroines who collaborate, relate and share. For most of us, our hero’s or heroine’s quest is not muscular but a courageous response to the challenges of life. As Saturn travels with Neptune in Aries our perspective may shift. During the next three years, as unseen forces move through the Collective, our attention will be drawn to the complex notion of identity and belonging, freedom and self-expression. This is the impetus of the risk-taking trailblazer. This is when we feel the fear and do it anyway. As Saturn moves through Aries, we claim our own authority, clarify our goals, grow in maturity and self-acceptance. For those of us with planets or angles in Aries, this three-year-Camino may compel us to unapologetically reveal a brighter, braver version of ourselves as we claim our own authority, grow in maturity, soften in self-acceptance.
Saturn stations Retrograde from July 12th to November 27th, 2025, and moves back to the final degrees of Pisces on September 1st and then enters Aries on the day before Valentine’s Day 2026, to journey through Aries until April 12th, 2028. Saturn transits compel us to conserve our energy and reserves to focus on those things that we may now find meaningful, that serve us in some practical way.
These next few months deliver a preview of the substance of Saturn’s three-year journey through Aries. Saturn moves back into Pisces briefly from September 1st; until on February 13th, it moves decisively through Aries until April 2028.
Saturn represents the principle of structure and form, restraint and responsibility. Aries is the impulse that prompts us to take a risk, to venture into the unknown. Saturn’s presence will cool and temper the rashness of Aries and activate the Aries section of your birth chart, already primed by the long Venus transit and her Retrograde cycle, as well as Chiron’s journey through Aries (2018-2026). In myth, Saturn is depicted carrying a scythe so there is an emphasis on cutting, severing and when Saturn is in Aries, patience will be needed before we cleave something apart too hastily or commit to something prematurely. On the day of Saturn’s ingress into Aries, Mercury conjoins Uranus in Taurus for the last time (May 24th) so pay attention to new stories, developments in world events that foreshadow events that will unfold over the next three years. Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale spoke out at the British Book Awards: “Words are our earliest human technology, like water they appear insubstantial, but like water they can generate tremendous power… Political and religious polarisation, which appeared to be on the wane for parts of the 20th century, has increased alarmingly in the past decade. The world feels to me more like the 1930s and 40s at present than it has in the intervening 80 years.”
Yet the world is a different place now. Humankind has evolved, access to information and misinformation is more widespread. Pluto is moving through Aquarius. Uranus enters Gemini on July 7th; Neptune has moved into Aries. These outer planets reflect the profound changes in the collective consciousness.
As the days of May pass by, the first delicate blush of spring assumes a new confidence. White and mauve wisteria, blowsy magnolias, the last of the bluebells sheltering beneath a canopy of green. Nature reminds us of the transience of life.
As Saturn enters Aries, we reimagine our identity. We may meet ourselves, or a new version of ourselves at the starting line. We break new ground. We find the strength to let something, or someone go, to venture forth, to meet ourselves a-new, to feel the fear and dare greatly.
Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care for many years. In her memoir, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying; A life transformed by the Dearly Departing, Bronnie writes that is not money or status, but “the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common of all.”
Here are the five most common regrets:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
On June 16th, Jupiter and Saturn make their third square, in new signs, Saturn working hard, pared down to bare essentials in Aries, the sign of its fall, Jupiter in its exaltation, in Cancer, calling us back from the busyness of life to those things that provide shelter from the world.
Once we acknowledge that limited time is remaining, although we don’t know if that is years, weeks or hours, we are less driven by ego or by what other people think. Instead, we are more driven by what our hearts truly want. Acknowledging our inevitable, approaching death offers us the opportunity to find greater purpose and satisfaction in the time we have remaining.”
― Bronnie Ware.
Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology consultation: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
