Change. Transition. Transformation.
The terms are often thrown around interchangeably.
Almost daily I hear from people who want to change something in their lives. They want more success. Better habits. More effective time management. More money.
In one way or another, they want things to be different from how they are.
Not just for a day, but for the foreseeable future.
Yet many of these same people balk at the work required to create the “change” they are seeking.
That’s because the change they are seeking isn’t a change at all; it’s a transformation.
We might use these words interchangeably, but they carry distinctly different meanings.
As Pluto, the planet of transformation, stations direct (October 10 at 9:09 PM EDT) after 6 months retrograde, marking a change in direction, it pulls focus to the difference between a change and transformation.
And it offers an opportunity to dig beneath the surface to delineate the difference.
What’s the difference between a change and transformation, and how does transition fit into this mix?
Change
Change happens in an instant.
One moment you’re going in one direction and the next moment you’re going in a different direction.
You were in the womb and then out of the womb.
You were single then you were married.
You were pregnant, then you had a baby.
You were employed and then unemployed.
You lived in one home then you moved to another.
Things change all the time.
They change one way then another. They go back and forth.
Winds. Tides. Planetary ingresses. Planets stationing direct or retrograde. Birth. Death.
No matter what the context or situation, you can point to a moment in time when something changed.
The moment of change is precise. We can mark it in time with a clock and a calendar. We can mark it in space on a map.
You lived there, now you live here.
When a planet stations retrograde, the station itself happens at a precise time and location in the sky. We can chart it to the degree and the minute in the map of the sky and to the precise second.
Pull back, however, and you’ll see a different timeline.
Transition
Surrounding the moment of change is a bigger period of transition.
When does spring turn into summer, or summer into autumn?
How long are you at your new job before it’s no longer “new”?
How long do you live in a house before it no longer feels new, before the paths you travel daily feel like part of your routine?
Transition is the time it takes us to adapt to the change. It encompasses the before and after: the lead up and the follow up.
It’s the larger container in which the moment of change exists. It’s less precise. We can’t always pinpoint it.
If you chart the movements of a planet before and after it stations retrograde or direct, you’ll see that it slows down before the station. After the moment of change it continues to move slowly for a while, eventually picking up speed – depending on how fast it can go.
It hovers around the degree of the station for a while, on both sides. It’s a period of intensification, as if it’s digging in to settle in that spot for a bit as it navigates the change.
When you take a car from forward to reverse, you pause between the two.
This is transition. Moving from one state to the next takes more time than the precise moment of change. It requires slowing down. Pausing.
It’s a process. A mini journey in the larger journey.
Transformation
And then there’s transformation. It’s both related and also on some level an entirely different type of thing.
Transformation is an even larger container, a longer arc of time surrounding transition.
Transformation is subtle. It’s always in the process of happening, but typically not noticeable until there’s enough movement and a context that illuminates it.
You don’t see the caterpillar in the cocoon stage; you see the caterpillar and the butterfly.
If you were to examine the cocoon it wouldn’t look like much. You wouldn’t know what was happening.
Transformation is a mysterious process, like a black box in which we put one thing and then pull out something else.
Transformation involves a little alchemy. A little magic. A little mystery.
It’s subterranean. Deep. Subtle. Until the moment of reveal.
Unlike change, once something undergoes transformation it doesn’t revert back.
You’re making cookies. You mix the ingredients to create cookie dough. That’s already a transformation. Once you’ve combined the ingredients you can’t extract them individually.
You put the dough into the oven and ten minutes later you pull out cookies. The cookies don’t go back to being dough.
Transformation involves a death and a birth. Something must die to create the new thing. It becomes subsumed within the thing it becomes.
In cookies, each ingredient gives itself up in favor of the whole. A well-functioning team is more than a collection of individuals.
Pluto’s Station Direct
Transformation is the realm of Pluto, which stations direct today after 6 months retrograde.
Pluto spends years in a sign, working over each degree several times, allowing nothing to go unworked.
Pluto moves slowly as it is, so its movements don’t draw much attention unless it is coming into aspect with another planet.
The moment of its station is exact.
The transition period is an intensification of its energy; it pulls focus to this area of our charts regardless of what aspects it makes to other planets.
As Pluto stations it pulls our attention to issues of power, control, death, and rebirth. Pluto is in the late degrees of Capricorn, which deals with issues such as hierarchical structures, governments, and the power dynamics that exist there.
The secret to getting to where you want to go is knowing where you are.
As Pluto stations direct, it invites us to look at these issues in this area of our lives, and assess:
- What has changed?
- Where am I in a transition?
- What is being transformed?
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