Last weekend, my boyfriend and I drove out to his family farm to get a big garden area ready for planting, and as I was jumping up and down to dig my fork into the soil, I wondered if maybe my chart was made for farm life, with my Saturn so prominent on the MC, squaring my mars. Saturn, after all, rules hard, physical work. He turns ideas and plans into real, touchable, tangible physical manifestations via hard processes, like manufacturing, time or labour of the body. Astrologer Jim Lewis says many people have Saturn as a shadow planet in their charts, meaning it’s a hard planet to integrate into the psyche, and when it’s not integrated, it’s projected outward onto bosses or authority, and we need to learn to integrate it into our lives. In Enneagram language, that means integrating the superego. Doing manual labour helps us integrate Saturn.
It’s going to be our first garden out there, and I’m excited to plant some seeds and test out this soil; it’s reportedly some of the richest in Saskatchewan. Last summer, we scraped the paint off a barn to get it ready for re-painting, but the process was so slow, and we couldn’t get it all off, so we were excited to do something that we could actually cross off our list. Last week, a neighbor generously lent us their rototiller, and we pushed the rototiller over 6 long strips. Don’t tell my parents, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to love physical labour, and find it helps me get in touch with my Saturn, something I have a very hard time integrating.
I work in an office, and sometimes while scanning through File Explorer, trying to find where to save a particular document, I’ve said to myself, “God, I wish this was manual labour.” If Saturn can’t make things physical, he’ll make them difficult, and with my Saturn aspects, it’s sometimes hard to manoever around such a non-tactile world, when you’re saving things onto a server that you can’t see by clicking on an icon on your screen, or onto One Drive, which I find especially baffling, saving onto a cloud. I hate the invisibility of it all. I probably photocopy more than I should, just because hard copies of documents help me dig into my work better, serving as a metaphorical jumping off point into mental labour.
My time at the farm gives me a deep appreciation for the pride of Saskatchewan farmers and the good kind of pain in the body after a day of work. As a Four, I love feeling physically sore after having done something productive; working the body is a beautiful way to balance out my heart and head that operate on overdrive. Not everyone gets the privelege of farming- land is so expensive, and I can see how owning it and working it is a point of pride. I feel priveleged to be able to partake in the work and see how it balances me out spiritually as well.