So anyways, I’m a little in procrastination mode. It’s Christmas Eve and aside from the rum balls, all the work is done.

Hubby was up at 4am this morning to do the queuing thing for the 3kgs of prawns we’ll work our way through on our neighbour’s deck tomorrow evening. The presents have been wrapped, and the trifle and potato salad for our family Christmas lunch have been prepared and are in the fridge.

All I have left is to write something about Saturn in Sagittarius…So I’ve been procrastinating. With my favourite procrastination tool- re-runs of The West Wing.

And procrastination has, as procrastination often does, turned into inspiration- with this speech from Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) at the end of Episode 10, Season 6. An episode titled, oh so appropriately, A Faith Based Initiative:

Hope is real.

In a life of trials and a world of challenges, hope is real…

In a time of global chaos and instability where our faiths collide…hope is real.

Hope is what gives us the courage to take on our greatest challenges…there is no such thing as false hope. There is only hope.

You see, this to me is what Saturn in Sagittarius will be about- our hopes, our faith, our beliefs…and the fears and excesses and excuses that hold us back from these.

The hopes we’re talking about here are the ones we need courage to pursue, the ones that really matter, the ones we’re prepared to put ourselves into and step out of our comfort zones for.

The faith and beliefs are the ones that we hold in our souls to be true, the ones that we’ve arrived at through study, through reflection, through experience. The ones that we may have found outside our up-bringing, the ones we’ve developed through further learning, the ones we’re prepared to take a leap for, the ones we’ve discovered as we’ve explored outside our physical and metaphorical boundaries.

Saturn in Sagittarius may find us struggling with faith, with hope, with optimism. It may find us with our wings clipped. It may put fences in our way that we need to leap across. It may find us exploring past what we know, to something we need to know… or don’t know yet.

It may have us questioning those beliefs that we’ve been told not to question, taught not to question, encouraged not to question.

It may have us feeling as though our wings have been clipped, or it may have us finding the courage to fly higher. It may have us discovering a new spirituality, or embracing something more conservative that we’d previously dismissed. It may have us going back to school to immerse ourselves in something new, or it may have us teaching others.

The thing is, study, travel, reading, exploration…all these things expand our horizons and our minds. They open us up and push us out so that we can reconcile our personal beliefs with those of the greater world.

Along the way will be the usual Saturn lessons- after all, for the next 2½ years (or thereabouts) it’s this stuff that we need to get real about, deal maturely with. There’s no avoiding it.

I’ll be back over the next few days with some hints and tips to help you DIY this.

For now, a few things to remember:

• Saturn transits can be tough, but then also be joy in the challenge…although often this can only be seen in hindsight… and yes, I have my share of Saturn war stories that haven’t turned out so well, but there’s a lesson in each of them- Saturn can be a little like a Karmic traffic cop.
• Those with Saturn well integrated into their charts tend to have an easier time accepting and adopting Saturn lessons than those of us who are, shall we say, a tad more challenged from a reality and patience viewpoint.
• Check out the timing. I’ve popped the degrees onto the Saturn page. In 2015, Saturn will travel to 11 Sagittarius- this will mean that Saturn will conjunct the Sun of anyone born between 23 November and 4 December (or thereabouts) during 2015. Some of you will have one pass, some three- depending on the retrograde cycle.
• Saturn transits might seem external- as though you’ve been dealt a really shitty hand but, as Robert Hand reminds us in Planets in Transit, Saturn transits represent what it is that we really want and help us to get that. The problem is, most of don’t really know what it is that we really really want. ‘If you thoroughly understand your needs and wants, you will find that Saturn simply brings about their manifestation. The “losses” that Saturn brings are of things that you do not want or need. No matter how much you think you want them, let them go…’
• Finally, again to quote Robert Hand, ‘very few people are so in touch with themselves that they can react to Saturn positively. In a very real sense, Saturn is the teacher, but it is each of us teaching ourselves about what we really are.’