By
John Townley
For all the
positive free-will spin
modern astrologers have
put on astrology, it’s still a bit like the weather
– everyone’s always talking
about it, but nobody ever does anything about it. The planets deal
their ever-changing
cards, and we play the hand we’ve been dealt as best we can.
Of course,
as with the weather, we can
be smart enough to know
to go inside when it rains, and that smacks a bit of free will, and
it’s what
most people use astrology for – to know when to batten down
the hatches or when
it’s a good day for the beach. But astrologically, we can do
even more: we can
actually go to where it isn’t raining on our lives – or at
least
change the form of
precipitation and where it’s likely to hit us. To a limited
extent, we can actually derail destiny, fool around with fate -- if,
indeed, astrology has any more effect on either than do common and
often critical daily choices.
The
Solar Return: travel for your birthday
That can be
done, so far, in two
different ways. The
easiest, but most temporary, is to choose well where we spend our solar
(and to
a lesser extent our lunar) returns. If your next solar return/birthday chart has
a
nasty
afflictor squatting right on the Ascendant, no problem – just
take a trip and
spend your birthday a time zone or two Eest of where you’d
normally be, and
that bad boy is tucked safely away in the hidden twelfth house
or even the
relatively friendly eleventh house
where it can do you less tangible harm for
the year. Or, if it looks like your solar return Sun or Moon is going
to be
trapped in the twelfth,
a time zone or two of Western travel will roll
it right up front into the first house
where it can really work for you all
year. And, it’s a good excuse for birthday vacation travel.
If you really get
into it, you can investigate all sorts of places that amazingly
maximize
benefics and minimize malefics for the year. I know so many astrologers
and
their clients who enthuse about the results – although you
can’t compare what
actually might have happened with what did in any year, whether you
travel or
not. But the tales of positive shifts, and their details, can be pretty
compelling.
Solar return travel may enable escape from bad
aspects, or spiral around and
get you eaten elsewhere. What to do?
Since
I’ve travelled a
great deal for my solar returns, I’ve
got a lot to tell, probably the most convincing about when I
couldn’t make the
needed trip because of happenstances and walked eyes wide open into a
disastrous year involving events totally not of my own making but which
might
have been easily avoided with a plane trip. Like the year of a horrible
twelfth
house Sun with Saturn rising, Moon in sixth
afflicted by Neptune.
Looked like illness, for sure. On a limited budget, a flight to a
couple of
selected towns in the South would just beat it out, putting a more
robust Sun
right on my Ascendant, but tropical storm Fay came along at the last
minute
and
all possible flights were cancelled, I was stuck in New York with my
dreadful return. My subsequent year was
spent
in and out of hospitals. Was this cause and effect, or just cosmic
synchronicity? A bit of both, I expect…the illness was on
its way and that, along
with Fay, probably conspired with the cosmos at large to shoot down my
travel
plans. You can’t dodge the bullet with your name on it. And
although they say if
you are born to hang, you’ll never drown, if you’re
born to drown, all it takes
is a puddle.
On the up
side, every place
I’ve successfully visited to get a
better solar return has filled me with joy and mystery, even when
(perhaps
particularly when) it’s an out-of-the-way place I
wouldn’t think to go except
for its momentarily convenient longitude and latitude. Tales of some of those
here.
That’s a feeling I
share with many of my clients who regularly travel to get a better
year. A
typical comment from a client who travelled from California to Niagara
Falls
for his return just last month:
“Everything
about this
journey had a mystical quality to
it. As if, somehow I found a portal to another dimension. And really my
only
regret is not staying longer.”
Often my
feelings, exactly, and the
results of being in an
unusual place at an unusual time can provide an experiential twist that
may
not
entirely surface until years later, altering your life and taking your
breath
away when it does. Under any circumstances, it can’t hurt,
and a great excuse
to take a break and get out of town!
Diverging paths may both wind up at the
same place, here lower
Manhattan, one just a bit more interesting than the other.
Relocation:
Go There, Stay There
Of course,
if going for a visit is
so great, why not live
there? That’s the other way you can actively change the
otherwise-ineluctable
effects of the planets. A quick look at an AstroCartography chart
showing where
around the world your planets would be rising or culminating will tell
the
tale. You’ll be energized in spots where Mars, Jupiter, or
the Sun are angular,
slowed down by places where Saturn is the same. If you’ve
travelled much, the
map is a revelation, explaining a lot about why certain things tend to
happen
to you when you go certain places. It’s not a total
replacement for your natal
chart, but it can really put a different spin on what’s
available to you in
different places. With my Venus/Mars midpoint going straight over New
York City,
the Big
Apple is just too sexy to escape from, for me, though for others it can
spell
misery. With Mars/Uranus culminating in Poland, that country sets me on
fire
with instant fame, but also puts me in more danger than I’d
like, with some
close calls I wouldn’t like to repeat. But with mellow
Mercury rising over
southern England, I dream of spending my latter days near Glastonbury
writing
and letting the amazing ambience of the Old Straight Track suffuse my
bones…
Whether it's returns, relocation, or
space travel, the larger
your canvas, the more choices you have.
Futuristic
Free Will
Returns and
relocations are for the
moment the only ways you
can take the celestial bull by the horns and wrestle it to where you
want to
go, simply by changing the houses where planets occur. You
can’t change the
relations of the planets to each other – well, not so far. In
a few
generations, we will no longer have those restrictions. When you can go
to the
Moon (as our children or grandchildren will), you’ll remove
the Moon itself in
any chart you look at and replace it with a transiting Earth exactly
opposite
to its former position. Go farther afield, once we’ve
terraformed Mars (or at
least learned how to make it a bit more friendly), and the entire set
of
aspects between all of the inner and middle planets will be totally
rearranged
as long as you are there. And so will the tropical signs themselves, as
Mars’s
tilt and orbit creates a whole set of Zodiacal signs and
seasons
totally
different from ours here on Earth. You will be able to change
everything –
houses, signs, and aspects – completely according to where
you decide to
travel. That travel broadens one’s outlook is more than just
a philosophical
observation – it’s at the heart of exercising free
will in an astrological
context. The farther you do
go, the further you can go...
Will it
ultimately free you to do
anything you want?
Probably not. Not anymore than I could escape the collusion of tropical
storm
Fay and my kidney stones. But you can cut yourself a whole lot more
slack by giving it your best shot than
you ever could by simply staying put and accepting what
comes…
P. S. For
our service/report combination to work out your own return, see The Birthday Report...
