Are you an artist of any kind?  You can admit it 🙂 Fame is not a marker of talent. I’ve got dancers, writers, actors, musicians, healers as clients. People driven to create.

Not that I don’t love working with businesswomen and students and social workers and stay-at-home parents too. I do 🙂 It’s a certain sensibility that I love.

Tonight I was thinking again about the poem. About my old friend from college days, a fellow poet, getting me out of my “retirement” because he’s now editor of a new on-line journal, which made me think of Saturn, STRUCTURE and my love for structure. The line, the outline.

Any artist knows, any creative person knows, any thinking person knows that inspiration is not enough. You have to… fit it into something. You have to shape it. You have to chip away. Hone. Correct. Cut.

It’s quiet as I type here. But I can hear  1. the wind 2. a baby crying in the house next door. And I, we, can take these sound-pieces and I, we, can structure them and create something, a story. A story about the wind, a story about the baby. My poem is going to be a New York poem, a love poem.

What’s your poem going to be? What’s your life going to be? What do you want it to be?

With Saturn going retrograde in February I wonder what will happen to the structures. Will we feel more creative? Or less? Rudderless? Plenty of ideas but no fences? Or a much needed blast from the past. More free? Or that our efforts get us nowhere?

I’m thinking the retrograde period could be a respite from all the bone crushing soul searching work (hello to all those in therapy) that you’ve been doing. You’ve been diving down deep into the underworld and bringing back treasure but it often feels more exhausting than liberating. Saturn chains us. Keeps us here. Our karma.

Saturn retrograde, however, is our Sabbath. We get a break.

If I were a drinking man 😉 I’d raise a class right now… but I don’t really drink and the only thing in the cupboard is some gross sweet liquor (long story there) so let me just say this: find the room in your life. Wiggle room. Elbow room. Space. It may only be… one inch of space or one minute of space, 8 x 10, a corner of a room, a corner of a corner of a corner, it may be… one little inhale that you drink at night when you’re finally alone and everyone’s asleep…

Put something inside that space. It’s yours. Put even more space if you want. A piece of paper. A word. Thought. Idea. Plan. Something. Something that will bud.

Jupiter goes direct next week. Saturn goes retrograde a few weeks later. I think you can do this. I think you can expand and contract well, better than you ever have. Am I right?

Now go write that poem 🙂