a return
on home, saturn, and woody guthrie
they say your first saturn return is a time of transition between two major phases of your life. i sadly cannot remember mine when it happened, because i was too preoccupied with addiction and toxic relationships to experience it in any meaningful way at the time. trauma can rob you of a lot of things like that. but according to astrologers and a song kasey musgraves wrote about it, your saturn return happens when you are roughly 29 years old as the planet saturn finally crosses back into the same position of the sky it was in when you were born. in my case that would be libra, but it's not really important. since saturn rules time and wisdom, it is said that your return is likely to be a period of massive transformation, and that kind of evolution can of course come with some growing pains. it can lead to relationships ending, careers changing, or a move to a new city. but mostly it illuminates the things that are no longer serving you, which helps usher us out of a karmic cycle and back into our truest self. a return home if you will, for both saturn and the spirit.
my concept of home has always been a strange one as my family moved around quite often growing up, and i didn't attend the same school for two years in a row after the third grade. i'm thankful for that in many ways as it forced me to be able to adapt to new places, people, and surroundings rather quickly. i would continue that trend in my adult life, spending the majority of it in california but often bouncing to colorado, georgia, florida, and south carolina with a pit stop in new zealand. to make a short story long, i have simply never known how to answer the very basic question of where i am from. i get asked this a lot living in thailand, and it should be a simple answer. yet i don't have any identity tied to a specific location. this predicament always reminds me of woody guthrie, a folk singer, activist, and hero of mine who grew up in oklahoma and moved to new york to play music. he was quoted as saying that when he was in new york he felt like an oklahoman, and when he was in oklahoma he felt like a new yorker. this sums up my feelings quite well, and what a paradoxical talent to be blessed with: the ability to blend in everywhere without truly belonging to anywhere. never a tourist, but always a traveler of sorts.
i have a complicated relationship with travel myself because 95% of the travel in my life has been for work in wine and food. i feel incredibly lucky to have had a career take me on a culinary tour of not only the united states but much of europe, new zealand, and australia. in a world that has been short on hope as of late, i truly believe that food and music are some of the final fabrics that still bind our communities together. i got to see a lot of that up close, and i am sure from the outside it looked like a dream. it was in many ways, but what i will say is that the content i used to post on instagram is naturally only the highlights of the beautiful meals and talented chefs we worked with. you didn't see the gas station burrito at 1am on a six hour drive, or staying at the holiday inn express 90 miles outside of atlanta because i was too tired to make it home to charleston. but spending up to 300 nights a year in a hotel over the last several years taught me a lot about myself and my resilience. it is often mentioned that when you travel your problems don't stay at home, and that is true. you can be at the most luxurious hotel on the most beautiful beach, but if you hate yourself, it doesn't seem that nice.
jim carrey of all people (yes ace ventura) expanded on this many years ago and it sticks with me today. he said that he wished everyone's dreams could come true so that they could see that wasn't the ultimate answer. the external can never heal the internal. and somewhat ironically, my dreams never really started coming true until i was at peace with myself. but i remember very well the feeling of having every reason to be happy and still being uncomfortable in my own skin.
in the precepts of the theravada buddhist sutras there is a scripture that chronicles the final teachings of guatama buddha to his students before his death. there is of course some ambiguity around the translation, but my preferred reading of it recounts him saying something to the effect of "be a lamp unto yourself, be a refuge unto yourself. take yourself to no external refuge". while it's likely that buddha was talking to his students about gurus as being an external refuge, i think for most of us it's easy to think that some other person or thing will give us shelter from the storm. a vacation. a new job. a relationship. but that trip to paris won't save you. a new house won't save you. the moderately attractive guy from hinge with the mullet and a mustache who doesn't have a box springs under his mattress (definitely) won't save you. but you can save yourself, and the nice thing about being your own refuge is that you take it wherever you go.
so maybe the saturn return in your late 20's really is about transition. a culmination of trying everything at least once over the previous decade and identifying what you want from this life as you move into adulthood. but there is a different kind of return to the heart that happens when you shed the weight of the limiting beliefs we place on ourselves. unlearn the social conditioning and expected timelines we were taught. and strip away the need for external validation to reveal a person in control of their own happiness. there is a peaceful autonomy in uncovering that sense of self again, and ultimately what is left is a home in which to reside. it’s a pretty nice home too, you just need wifi.