Chiron / Moon, This is where I want to be today….somewhere alone in the peace and quiet of the Scottish countryside, minding my own business, feeling at home in a place I have no right to feel at home in, and not trapped here in the heat and humidity of Northern New Jersey, where the thermostat hit 90 F today and 90 percent humidity, and humanity hit 100 on the disgruntlement meter.  We are a crabby, impatient, complaining, demanding lot, we New Jersey people.  Don’t believe me?  Just hesitate at a red light for a moment here, or watch The Sopranos.  And I need a vacation.

I’m supposed to be on a vacation of sorts.  I’m supposed to be writing.  And here I am, look, I’m writing.  I’m supposed to be putting out a new issue of the Gyre with an update on BML.  I’m supposed to be finishing my book on Chiron in synastry, “Beyond the Wound.”  For those of you who are still young, fresh, and untainted by the pressures of time, a week may seem an eternity.  But when you have passed your Chiron return, you know that a week is shorter than the blink of an eye.  My brother and I laughed during my birthday phone call on Tuesday.  How did we get here?  We have the sense of having experienced somehow both more and less than we thought we would.  I suppose that means we end up even.  Saturn cradles us within space/time and Chiron takes us beyond it.

I sometimes feel that there is a genuine war going on between Saturn and Chiron.  Saturn rubs our noses in the here and now–take care of this, fix that, suck it up and do the drudge work.  At the same time, Chiron is often saying, “No–look there–far, far away from here.  Something you’ve never seen before, something that will deliver you…”  It’s a hard decision to make, and we don’t always have time for both.  If we are Saturn types and clean up the boring, necessary stuff before we move on, we often miss the juiciest piece of what Chiron has to offer, leaving Chiron’s message corrupted and confused.  If we move to Chiron first and take care of Saturn later, we will often feel ungrounded and unprepared for the messages he is passing on to us.  I have both strong in the chart.  Saturn is conjunct my North Node, and Chiron is opposing my Moon.  Sometimes, caught between the two vortices, the answer is paralysis, which is what I’ve been feeling lately.  Faced with strong pulls from both, it’s difficult to make decisions as to what to do first.  Saturn wins, of course.  Saturn always wins.  And that leaves us facing the futility and frustration of a Chiron longing to be liberated.  Rather like a Chiron story where he actually does get chained to the rock for a moment or two and gets his liver chomped on by the hungry eagle.  Don’t let that eagle symbolism get past you–it’s important.

But when one has Chiron/Moon in hard aspect in the chart, it is often the case that the everyday pressures of life become a spiritual burden.  Those of us with Chiron/Moon know that the ‘ordinary’ life is not possible for us.  If we are one of the ‘lucky’ ones who also have Chiron opposite Uranus (as many of us do who were born in the last century), not only is the ordinary life not possible for us, but we know for certain that we are here to do something significant, to fulfill a task, and we may not know what that is until our Chiron return approaches.  And even when we know that task, finding the time and place to fulfill it may become a great, and even exhausting, challenge.  Ordinary life itself can seem very alien to Chiron/Moon–someone has dropped us off in the wrong place and we would like to go home now, please.  Chiron/Moon is often born into a family that feels alien to its very way of being.  Not that there isn’t any love–sometimes there isn’t, but often there is.  But the family must learn to love what is not part of the ‘group’ (and learn that the alien has its own way of doing things) and Chiron/Moon needs to accept that it will never belong and at the same time find a home for itself that feels true to its being.  Only then can it breathe free.  Chiron/Moon is often the wise one of the family, no matter what age it is.  Chiron/Moon can be destined to play the guide/guru when it is very small.  This responsibility can cause Chiron/Moon to become very self-contained.

“Where is my real home?’ is often a question that obsesses Chiron/Moon.  Where do I belong?  Sometimes Chiron/Moon finds it, temporarily.  A group of friends that can feel like family, a work situation where everyone is pursuing the same goal, a group of fellow artists or seekers.  But most often, Chiron/Moon will lose this sense of ‘home’ after a few years and must set out on the road again.  And then one day, without warning, Chiron/Moon stops seeking, because ‘home’ is everywhere.  This is the universal consciousness that Chiron is preparing us for.  “Home” and “Family” and all those other painful words become a welcome gateway to further awareness.  Have I got there, yet?  No, not a chance.  Hence the longing for the Scottish countryside, which has always been a magical place for me.  A place where I can breathe, far away from New Jersey.  A number of years ago, after having lived in London (happily) for a decade, I deliberately tested my notion of ‘home’ by returning to the place I grew up.  (A strange thing to do, considering I spent most of my younger years figuring out how to get far away from here.)  I wanted to see what this word, ‘home’ really meant.  It was a long time living here before I realized that escaping home or finding a substitute home isn’t possible.  What we try to run away from is our own sense of not belonging.   And with Chiron/Moon, this is impossible.  We have to accept our ‘outsider’ status and find a way to be useful.  Our early experiences were preparing us to ask the right questions at the right time.

Any planet aligned with the Moon makes a big stamp on relationships.   The Moon is our comfort zone, our habitual behavior and our habitual emotional reactions.  It is the repository of our emotional wisdom and experience.  Chiron/Moon can produce real loners, people who are happier without company, thanks, though they appreciate it when they are in the mood.  It’s just too hard to explain the difference between ‘me’ and ‘you,’  and even more painful if you don’t feel or sense it.  (Not that ‘you’ aren’t special in your own right, and Chiron/Moon will feel that intensely.)  Unless the other person also has Chiron/Moon ties in the natal chart, they can never sense the intense ‘other-ness’ that Chiron/Moon carries deep within its being.  In order for a Moon/Chiron relationship to survive, this sense of ‘other-ness’ has to be respected.  The person who loves Moon/Chiron must understand that there are areas within Moon/Chiron that he or she will never reach.  The most hurtful thing you can do to Moon/Chiron is insist that it is just like everyone else–Moon/Chiron knows through hard experience that it is nothing like everyone else.  It often spends its life trying to be like everyone else, and gives up only after great duress.  Moon/Chiron, more than anyone else, knows that we can only belong to ourselves.

There are great gifts to Moon/Chiron, too, which I have written about before–the ability to transcend worlds (or this world, at least) at will.  Even when one has the ability, keeping in touch with it is difficult–Saturn, again, overwhelming us.  But it seems to me that this perceived conflict between Saturn and Chiron is something we all must work on if we are ever to find any peace within astrology itself.  Astrological knowledge is useless unless it is anchored in reality, unless it teaches, unless it helps.  It’s no good just pointing at the heavens and saying, Ah, well, I’ll blame the Uranus/Pluto square today, or the Mercury retrograde, or a tough Saturn square.  Chiron gives us the wisdom, but Saturn gives us the practical application, whether or not the two are actually in the mix in the skies.  We need the interchange between the two, in order to learn anything at all.  It’s no good telling someone they are this way or that because they were born at a certain time.  What do they do with the knowledge?  We need to begin to understand that both Saturn and Chiron are working with one and the same universe, that there IS no difference between Saturn’s demands and Chiron’s.   When we understand that our ‘ordinary’ lives are as miraculous as the most poetic esoteric wisdom, we win.

I know, it’s not easy.  Tell me about it.  My very Saturn/Neptune summer has included a flooded basement, burst pipes, a new water heater, a major shower leak,  a leaking water meter,  a major sloshing out of said basement, with black mold and all that entails, major paint jobs, huge sink holes in my bedroom floor which called for the entire floor to be replaced, and holes on either side of the upstairs banister.  It felt as if the entire place was falling down around my head.  And that’s just the water-related stuff.  Even with Progressed Mercury now conjunct my natal Neptune and about to conjunct my progressed Neptune, I’m hard pressed to find the wisdom or poetry within it.  And yet it’s there.  It must be.  Whether my faith in astrology is emerging to wash me clean for a new beginning, or Neptune and Saturn were offended by my neglected plumbing system (Saturn rules pipes), there is meaning to it.  I may not know what it is for years, but I know that it’s there.

Some of you have been asking for Part Two of Chiron/Moon:  The Endless Hunger.  I’ve been saying I’ll write it, completely forgetting that I already wrote it.  For those of you interested, it’s here: https://theinnerwheel.com/2013/01/28/the-endless-hunger-of-chironmoon-part-two-hunger-and-other/