Saturn returns are a sort of spiritual boot camp. They occur roughly every 29.5 years and are characterized by pivotal personal change and transformation. Saturn returns ask us to grow, to claim our inner authority, and to become more of who we truly are.

Any loss can trigger grief and all loss begins a three-part process of transition. Knowing how to navigate these transitions is key to creating a bigger, better next chapter.

When I was giving birth to my daughter, there came a point—about twelve hours into my unmedicated, at-home, every-90-seconds-a-contraction back-labor odyssey—where I was done. I looked up at my midwife, bleary and exhausted, and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” She smiled, beatifically, and said, “Okay. Let’s do something else.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say this month. My mind and heart are troubled by what I see and hear: Division, anger, violence, finger-pointing, hypocrisy, grandstanding, virtue-signaling, and a whole lot of agitated herd behavior. It’s truly disturbing.

One of the more obvious and trying aspects of this pandemic we’re floundering in is all the things we can’t do. This horrid little virus has spurred limitations the likes of which most of us have never seen.

The good thing about getting sick of yourself, of hitting a wall, is that it prevents further movement in that dead-end direction. It stops you. It also hurts, just to make the point very plain.

The turn of the year prodded me into thinking about my self-improvement project for the year and, while the list is long, I narrowed it down to the thing that has been tailing me for years – many years as a matter of fact.

I don’t know about you, but in my experience, “second best” was a phrase of defeat. “Come home with first or don’t come home,” my brother once quipped as I left for a debate tournament.

The other morning I sat in the pre-dawn darkness on my porch, wrapped up against the cold, staring at the stars with their piercing, distant magnificence. I listened to invisible raccoons running through the trees, saw the inky outline of the branches bending under their weight. I heard the soft clopping of deer hooves, and then the owl’s resonant, echoing call in the middle distance.

Trust is tricky. It’s all very easy to have trust when everything is going swimmingly; it’s another thing altogether to maintain total trust when you’re hanging on by your fingernails. Or fins. Whatever.