Our culture abides by a persistent myth that we should always be moving forward and that any movement “backward” is a failing on our part.
This belief is harmful — and inaccurate.
Studying the seasons and astrology has taught me how transitions actually work in nature.
Astrology, like the seasons, is the study of nature and it’s cycles.
Both the seasons of nature and the astrological map of the sky are mapped on a circle, not a square.
In a square, we reach an end point and turn the corner to move in a new direction. A circle is fluid; there are no hard pivots.
How Nature Handles Transitions
Yesterday the Sun moved into Pisces, the final season of winter. Pisces is known as a mutable sign: it covers the period where we transition from winter to spring. During Pisces season, we might get unseasonably warm days that give us hope that spring is about to emerge followed by a cold snap that leaves us feeling like we’ll be in winter forever.
We might repeat this back-and-forth dynamic a few times before we finally land in the pocket of spring, where we feel the slow steady march forward.
Transitions in Planetary Movement
As we follow the planets around the map of the zodiac, we see that they follow this pattern too.
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto spend multiple years in any sign of the zodiac. These planets also spend at least half of every year in retrograde motion, where they appear to be moving backward.
As a result, the nature of their change from one sign to the next is transitional: there is not just one singular point in time where any of these planets moves from one sign into the next.
We will see this up close this year, as Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus change signs. Each of these planets will move into their new sign for a few months, and then eventually retrograde back to their previous sign, before moving back to the new sign the next year. Jupiter, which also retrogrades once a year, sometimes moves back to its previous sign.
The inner planets, which generally move more quickly, have periods where they, too, appear to move backward — called retrograde. For example, Mercury is retrograde three to four times a year.
No Hard Pivots
The back-and-forth dynamic that often gets shamed as wavering or indecisiveness is actually the nature of transitions.
Nature’s dynamic of change is transitional: a back-and-forth, with periods of both/and. There are no hard pivots.
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