April 2019
Three Candles
There are three important stations this month, all hitting late Sagittarius through late Capricorn. This puts the spotlight on one little corner of the zodiac.
What part of your life is getting the one-two-three-punch? If you know your natal chart (if not, have an astrologer look at it), locate the houses involved.
Notice if you have any natal planets or angles being hit by these degrees:
• Jupiter (expansion) retrogrades on April 10th at 24° Sagittarius.
• Pluto (breakdown/ renewal) retrogrades on the 24th at 23° Capricorn.
• Saturn (contraction) retrogrades on the 29th, at 20° Capricorn.
These transits aren’t coming out of nowhere. The houses they fall in will have been impacted for a while, especially by Pluto, which has been hanging around mid-to-late Capricorn for years now. But a stationing planet has a special buzz to it. Its messages are more emphatic.
If you do rituals, schedule them for these days. Light a candle to the planet in question and open to its lessons. Transits tend to go more smoothly when we honor our planetary teachers.
What have you outgrown?
Jupiter’s station early in the month signals a stretching beyond where you have been.
Whatever house the transit falls in indicates the part of your life that is pushing against the walls of a container that has grown too constricted, like Alice in the white 
rabbit’s house.
Identify the part of your chart wheel activated by 24° Sagittarius. On April 10th, light a candle to broadening yourself in that area.
Throw it out
Transiting Pluto’s house placement tells us what department of our life has been decomposing. Like vegetable detritus turning into fertile soil, a regenerative mystery is underway.
Wherever Pluto is passing, new life will sprout eventually. But first, space has to be made for it. The lesson of the station is to surrender to this process as gracefully as possible.
Letting go of something that once had life in it is not easy, nor is it supposed to be easy. But struggling against it is harder, and futile in the long run.
As you light a candle to Pluto on April 24th, ask your deep psyche what you need to be free of. Pledge to give it up willingly.
Honor thy limitations
Like Pluto, Saturn is a planet of elimination. But unlike Pluto, Saturn doesn’t annihilate; it only curbs and sets boundaries. It asks us to stop wasting our time with nonessentials.
Saturn — especially in Capricorn — is also about the rules and regulations of worldly life, such as the codes that dictate professional behavior. The intention we set on the 29th should be to clarify what is and isn’t within our job description, literally or metaphorically.
As always with Saturn, this station is a test of maturity.
Here they come, ready or not
Saturn and Pluto transits are often uncomfortable, so our egos tend to resist them. Claiming ignorance of their meaning, we malign them and push them away.
We do so with blame. Either we make ourselves wrong, or we project their malice onto the outside world (even astrologers; we blame the planets themselves).
But on a deeper level, we know very well what’s going on. It’s about translating to our egoic self what our higher self already knows.
Astrology comes in handy here.
Images
Alice in Wonderland illustration by John Tenniel
Fatalism (bottom) by Jan Toorop, 1893