The Astrological Transits of Age 37

Second Waxing Saturn Square and Second Nodal Return

Matthew Currie’s recent post on the astrology of Burning Man has stuck with me for the past week or so. He wrote that Burning Man got its start on June 22, 1986, so it’s now experiencing both transiting Saturn square natal Saturn and a nodal return, and that explains why this year’s festival devolved into a muddy mess.

I was born later the same summer, so I’m having the same transits. I was starting to feel like those of us born in 1986 were being uniquely picked on, and then I realized that everyone has both a waxing Saturn square and a nodal return around age 37, similar to the better-known set of midlife crisis transits that everyone has in their early forties.

Nodal cycle of 18.6 years x 2 cycles = approximate age 37.2 years at second nodal return

Saturn cycle of 29.4 years x 1.25 cycles = approximate age 36.75 years at second waxing Saturn square

These general transits were also mentioned in the notes I took on a lecture Samuel Reynolds gave at NORWAC 2018 about predictable transits everyone experiences in their 30s, but I just hadn’t looked at those notes in some time.

What is unique to the current cohort of 37-year-olds is the signs in which the Saturn square and nodal return take place, so I will comment on that.

Waxing Saturn Square: Transiting Saturn in Pisces Square Natal Saturn in Sagittarius

Saturn is the cosmic judge. However, the particular flavor of judgment currently coming from transiting Saturn in soppy Pisces isn’t “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It’s more along the lines of, “God loves you so, so much, more than you can possibly imagine, and God wants to give you a big and nurturing hug, and God who loves you so, so much is just so, so saaaaaaaaaaaaad that you aren’t living up to your potential yet. Can’t you just see the little tear glistening in the corner of God’s eye because you’re 37 years old and you still live with your mother?”

To enhance the atmosphere of judgment I already feel, I have been watching the Instagram reels of Anthony Polcari (@_tonypindc) lately. I discovered this young bachelor via The Spectator. Tony makes videos showcasing the cute outfits he wears to work as a consultant in Washington, DC, as well as his adulting skills keeping up his own apartment there. His clothing reels have captions in the style of the captions on my self-portrait below.

I actually had a journalism internship at United Press International in Washington, DC, during the summer of 2005 — a few months after my first nodal return. Of course, when the Great Recession arrived a few years later, just as I graduated from college, journalism was hit hard. I therefore found other things to do. My parents were also affected by the major financial shock of the Great Recession, so I wound up living with them and helping financially support them for the rest of my father’s life.

For the past 16 years, I have had to just live with people thinking I am failing to adult because I still live with my parents. I don’t think that’s the most accurate view of the situation, but I acknowledge there is very little I can do to budge the entrenched certitude of stigma. According to a recent thread on r/Millennials, I’m not alone in having this type of experience, but that hasn’t seemed to change public attitudes.

Is it bad that I lived the life I lived instead of becoming a female version of Tony? The slower pace of life at home in Oregon gave me room to learn astrology. This journey didn’t offer the rapid gratification of two to three published bylines per week. However, the human behind the bylines in 2005 was a chaotic mess. I was not qualified to be a consultant to anyone about anything even at Tony’s ripe old age of 25. I just needed time and space to develop as a person.

I was watching Tony for reasons that were more about me than him, to the point I wasn’t even wondering about his astrological statistics. However, when he announced his 25th birthday on September 8, I couldn’t help looking up his chart. His time of birth and city of birth are unknown, but he is open about being from Boston, so I ran the noon chart for Boston without houses.

Tony has Mercury, the North Node, and Venus all at the beginning of Virgo square Pluto in early Sagittarius. All of this interacts with both transiting Saturn in early Pisces and my natal Saturn in early Sagittarius, so it makes sense that I would focus on him as an outlet for my own insecurities.

Although Tony appears to be in a hurry to grow up, he is still so visibly young that I don’t feel comfortable picking on his chart or transits further. I will just make a general statement that anyone with a lot of Virgo energy might feel the current transit of Saturn in Pisces more intensely than others and could therefore benefit from reading the essay anthology I edited earlier this year, Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces.

Nodal Return: North Node in Aries and South Node in Libra

For any cohort with the North Node in Aries and South Node in Libra — and there’s a new one every 18.6 years — embracing assertiveness is a challenge. For the cohort born April 5, 1986, to December 1, 1987, there are a couple of unique twists on this theme.

Firstly, the slow-moving dwarf planet Eris, named after the Greek goddess of discord and strife, has been getting some attention lately. I was born with Eris at 16°33’ Aries and the North Node (True Node) at 22°57’ Aries. Today, Eris is at 25°00’ Aries, and the North Node is at 25°05’ Aries. Any nodal returns occurring around this time are therefore likely to include more upheaval than the average amount of upheaval associated with the North Node in Aries.

Most people don’t like the discord Eris brings, but South Node in Libra people probably fear it more than anyone else. As depicted in the meme I made above, I often do get told to stand up for myself — and when I actually go through with it, the results are typically at least as bad as I expected, if not worse.

It's not just what the North Node in Aries/South Node in Libra person brings to the equation, though — the people they are practically likely to be involved with play a role too. During the early 1950s, Neptune was late in the sign of Libra. My parents and other relatives have this placement, so they all have Neptune on my South Node. Although many people born in the early 1950s are now retiring from the workforce or have already done so, I had bosses earlier in my working life with this placement too.

Although not everyone has children at the same age, it’s probably very common for people born in the late 1980s to have significant adults in their lives born in the early 1950s — if not their own parents, then perhaps their schoolteachers or bosses.

The South Node in Libra may always have a predisposition to be passive and defer to others, regardless of who those others are. When the people in positions of power over you happen to have Neptune on your South Node in Libra, though, they might really get in the habit of taking advantage of your sweet and compliant nature — and the emotional maelstrom that ensues when you even think about following the call of your North Node in independent Aries could be absolutely unreal.

What does independence look like, though?

You know me as an astrology writer because my father died in 2019 and his life insurance payout paid off my parents’ mortgage. After that, I was able to stay with my mother rent-free while breaking into freelance writing. Had my father lived — or had he never needed my financial support to begin with, permitting me to establish myself as a female Tony — I would have faced pressure to keep up an income more significant than intro-level clients paying $0.03 per word or less could deliver. Just when I needed it, I finally received the return on my investment in a situation that had seemed very unfair to me for a very long time.

Three years into freelance writing, I’m in a more stable place. Just before my birthday in August, I finally paid off the credit card debt that I mentioned in the preface of Booby Prize: An Astrological Novel. Sixteen years after I graduated from college and moved back in with my parents, moving out is finally within sight of being a realistic possibility.

As a bonus, the financial astrology presentations of Grace Morris often mention economic cycles associated with the Moon’s Nodes. In a 2022 forecast through Astrology University, she said that the housing market tops when the North Node is in Cancer and bottoms when the North Node is in Capricorn. The North Node moving into Aries now marks the halfway point between Cancer and Capricorn. According to the pattern Morris described, housing prices are likely to head down from here.

It might finally be within my power to turn off the faucet of social stigma that has been painfully dripping on me all this time. Am I morally obligated to do this so that other people’s frowns of pity will, at long last, turn upside down?

Would the world truly be a better place if my mom lived alone in her house with her own dishwasher and washing machine and I lived alone in an apartment with my own dishwasher and washing machine? I actually don’t know what the answer is anymore.

I’m reminded of teenagers who dye their hair and pierce their bodies to declare their individuality and then wind up looking indistinguishable from each other. The hard part of being an autonomous adult is that it doesn’t mean being autonomous in exactly the same way that everyone else is autonomous. You have to figure out what it means for you!