The Youth of Old Age (Ages 49–51)
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
Between ages forty-nine and fifty-one, Chiron (a minor planet associated with the myth of the Wounded Healer) returns to its natal or birth position, and we officially take leave of our youth. It is a time to make peace with ourselves, come to terms with our failures, and forgive ourselves for what we haven't accomplished. Some old dreams have to be sacrificed, yet like an exquisite evening gown that can no longer be worn, the material may be used to make something new.
Chiron was discovered in 1977, around the time the word “healing” became a buzzword. That same year, A Course in Miracles was published, Louise Hay wrote her first book (You Can Heal Your Body), and the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York, opened. It would become one of the nation's most popular and trusted retreat centers. All three of these events began quietly, yet over time, they would prove significant. Each in its own way energized the growing trend toward more holistic types of treatments and body/mind therapies, while simultaneously generating questions about the traditional forms and mindset of Western medicine.
The Human Potential Movement was spreading, and practices such as Transcendental Meditation and personal growth seminars like est (Erhard Seminars Training) were at their peak. It was a time of enormous self-discovery. Alcoholics Anonymous began back in 1935, but it wasn't until the late seventies and early eighties that 12-step programs such as Adult Children of Alcoholics and Overeaters Anonymous came into being. In many ways, Chiron himself was the original Adult Child of Alcoholics.
In Greek mythology, Chiron was a centaur (half man, half horse), simultaneously mortal and divine. Chiron was the offspring of Saturn (the Greek Cronos) and a sea nymph named Philyra. In one story, Philyra turned into a horse in an attempt to escape Saturn's rape. In another version of the myth, it was Saturn who transformed himself into a horse when his wife, Rhea, discovered him with Philyra. Regardless of which parent took equine form, Saturn didn't stick around to see his son grow up; Chiron's mother was repulsed by him and refused to have anything to do with him.
Rejected by both of his parents, Chiron retreated to a cave where he raised himself. There he was mentored by Apollo (the Sun god) who taught him healing arts such as homeopathy, herbs, and natural medicine, as well as astronomy and astrology. Athena (the goddess of wisdom) was also one of his tutors.
As a result, Chiron became a gifted teacher and healer; the kind who brings out the best in his pupils. His students included Jason, Hercules, Achilles, and other sons of great men and gods. Chiron taught them to be the heroes they were meant to be. The Chiron Return teaches us to be heroes—not who or what we thought we were but who we truly are.
Every age with a zero is daunting, but none more than the big 5-0. The fifties are an exciting time once we actually arrive; but the approach can feel unnerving, especially if we're not happy with the life we have. There is something about turning fifty that just screams for us to stop pretending: pretending to be happy, satisfied, and, above all, pretending that it's okay to be taking caring of everyone else and ignoring our own needs.
At fifty, we have to drop the mask we've been showing to the world and not worry so much about what others think. This can be both freeing and frightening. It can also be particularly challenging if we're strongly identified with a role that has outlasted its usefulness yet comes with certain perks attached.
Some people cannot or will not make the transition. It's not uncommon for people to die around this age: Judy Garland, photographer Diane Arbus, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, to name a few. This decade of one's life has a “grow or die” quality. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”
Wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time. When we fail to do this, we tend to repeat the same old story over and over again.
—Jean Houston
At our Chiron Return, we have the power to change our story, and it isn't unusual for our life to take off in a new direction. In our late forties and leading up to the Chiron Return, there's a significant period where ideas, plans, and projects are seeded. Since Chiron is located between the orbit of Saturn (a visible planet that represents tradition) and Uranus (a distant planet that is associated with progress and freedom) it's frequently referred to as a bridge, because it links the old and the new.
It's not uncommon for a teacher or mentor to appear at this time, who acts as a bridge or catalyst from one life direction to another. At other times, a failure or a loss can serve as a catalyst. Sometimes it can be both. Pay attention, because many seemingly ordinary meetings and events take place during the period leading up to the Chiron Return that ultimately can be life changing.
In her late forties, Jackie Kennedy Onassis surprised the world by taking a job as an editor at Viking Press. The vehicle for that move was Letitia Baldrige, who had once been Jackie's social secretary at the White House. She knew of Jackie's great love of books and suggested she consider a career in publishing. Baldridge encouraged Jackie to contact editor and publisher Tom Guinzburg of Viking Press. Jackie took her advice, called him, and accepted a job as a consulting editor. A year later, she moved on to Doubleday. The world of publishing provided a necessary sanctuary for Jackie during that period of her life. She would ultimately edit more than one hundred books.
During her late forties, supermodel Lauren Hutton spent much of her time in self-exile. Then photographer Steven Meisel featured her in the now-famous Barneys New York ad, in which she was not made up to look like her younger self but was allowed to appear as her own age. Hutton became the poster girl for women over fifty. She also revived her modeling career and paved the way for older models.
In her late forties, after the death of her great love (Denys Finch Hatton) and the loss of her beloved coffee plantation in Kenya, Karen von Blixen Finecke, better known by her pen name Isak Dinesen, returned to her native Denmark where she began writing. At fifty-two, she published her memoir Out of Africa.
Rejected by her publisher, the manuscript of Julia Child's book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, landed on the desk of a young assistant editor at Knopf named Judith Jones. As luck, destiny, or synchronicity would have it, Jones was passionate about French cooking. She took the manuscript home and tried out some recipes. Jones saw the book's potential and convinced her boss to publish it. At age forty-nine, having finally published her famous book, Julia Child left France and returned to the States; nine months later, she launched her brilliant television career—one that spanned three decades.
Just as in the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, it sometimes takes another person or an event to awaken a dormant part of ourselves. The Chiron Return can do that for us. Without Letitia Baldridge, Jackie Kennedy Onassis might never have considered a job in publishing. Likewise, had it not been for Judith Jones, Julia Child's manuscript might have remained buried in the rejection pile.
Assuming her career was over because of her age, Lauren Hutton initially refused that groundbreaking modeling assignment. Yet Steven Meisel wouldn't take “no” for an answer, and finally she agreed. However, when Hutton arrived at the photo shoot wearing jeans, a work shirt, and no makeup, Meisel recognized something in her and, through his photography, was able to bring it to the surface. Isn't that what a great Chironic teacher or therapist does?
Our bodies can act as catalysts by sending messages to us in the form of symptoms. So it's not unusual for health issues to surface at this time, for both men and women. This is not meant as a prediction and obviously does not occur for everyone; it's just one of the many ways Chiron can manifest.
Louise Hay wrote her first book, Heal Your Body, in 1976 at her Chiron Return. Around the same time, she had been diagnosed with incurable cervical cancer. She rejected conventional medicine and instead cured herself through a program that included forgiveness, therapy, and nutrition. Her book, which began as a small pamphlet, was later expanded into You Can Heal Your Life and was published in 1984 at Hay's Second Saturn Return at age fifty-eight. Louise Hay, along with her bestselling book, is a great expression of Chiron, himself a great healer and teacher.
In 2010, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was then fifty, was diagnosed with polyps during a routine colonoscopy. He had the procedure done as part of his TV show (The Dr. Oz Show). Afterward, Oz said that the procedure had probably saved his life. He used his crisis to serve as an opportunity to bring awareness to the issue of colon cancer and encourage others to get tested.
I've heard it said about Chinese medicine that we are born with a certain amount of chi, or energy, that stays constant until around age forty-eight or forty-nine. After that, we need to refine our habits. For those of us in good health, this may involve small adjustments, such as eliminating wheat or dairy, getting more sleep, changing our exercise routine, or adding certain vitamins. On the other hand, if we haven't been paying attention to our health, then this is the perfect time to get serious about it.
One of the most positive things we can do for ourselves at this particular passage is to get a full medical checkup. Integrative medicine is a growing trend that includes the best of both mainstream medicine and alternative therapies that treat the whole person. Since Chiron was a healer who worked with natural remedies, it may be timely to explore such treatments as acupuncture, homeopathy, and Chinese herbs.
With our child-rearing years behind us, our creative energies are freed. Our search for life's meaning begins to take on a new urgency, and we begin to experience ourselves as potential vessels for Spirit.
—Christiane Northrup, MD, The Wisdom of Menopause
Unlike other cycles, the Chiron Return is accompanied by real biological changes, as it coincides with the median age of menopause in women; in the Western world, that age is fifty-one.
“Menopause” comes from the Greek root words meaning “the cessation of monthly cycles.” But perimenopause (peri means “around” or “near”) can begin at around forty, when many women experience some bone loss and hormonal changes. Astrologically, that is the same time as the Uranus opposition, a time of waking up to who we are. By age forty-four, most women begin to have irregular periods and 80 percent skip periods all together. By the late fifties menopause is usually complete, which means that the entire process goes from midlife to the Second Saturn Return.
At menopause, our hormone levels are changing, and it can feel as if our filters have disappeared. Emotions bubble up, nerves are raw, tempers explode. Whatever needs and desires we've repressed for the sake of keeping peace and maintaining the status quo break through to the surface. Sometimes it isn't pretty, and although the timing may be wrong and we overreact, it's important to remember that the emotions themselves are real. Change is inevitable, and our hormones are the key to getting in touch with that. Christiane Northrup notes that this is the time when our hormones give us an opportunity to see—at last—what were need to change in order to live fully into the second half of our lives.
“No” is a complete sentence.
Problems occur when we don't make the necessary changes, when we stuff our emotions down and don't express our feelings. Then our bodies find ways to get our attention, sometimes creating serious illnesses. In The Wisdom of Menopause (probably the best book on this subject), Christiane Northrup writes that menopause demands an outlet. If it doesn't find an outlet, a voice, a way to express itself, then what can break down is our health. The result can be one of “the big three” diseases of postmenopausal women: heart disease, depression, and breast cancer.5
Northrup wrote about menopause not as a collection of symptoms that must be fixed or eliminated, but about the transformation that is available at this time. Today, people are living and working longer. This period of life is an opportunity to establish a new level of health and well-being, one that will sustain us in the years ahead.
According to Northrup, it depends on two things. “First, we must be willing to take full responsibility for [our share of] the problems in our lives. . . . The second requirement for transformation is more difficult by far: we must be willing to feel the pain of loss and grieve for those parts of our lives that we are leaving behind.”6
During her Chiron Return at fifty-one, Gloria Steinem discovered a tiny lump in her breast. She immediately went for a mammogram and it proved to be benign; a follow up test also proved negative, and she accepted the results without question. Another test, the following year, revealed it was malignant. Steinem chose to have a lumpectomy and underwent six weeks of radiation treatments.
By her own admission, the only exercise she got at this time was running through airports; Steinem worked constantly, ate poorly (often consuming large quantities of ice cream), and her apartment wasn't properly furnished; it was merely a place to change clothes between business trips.
Around this same time, a close friend encouraged Steinem to see a therapist. For all her brilliant accomplishments, influence, and energy, Gloria Steinem had never explored her childhood and its extreme poverty and lack of parenting. The therapy opened a window into her past and gave her the tools to heal. She slowed down and began to take better care of herself.
Another friend helped her furnish the apartment, teaching her the value of fine cotton sheets. Afterward, she wrote Revolution from Within: A Book of Self Esteem, which was published in 1992, at her Second Saturn Return. Behind the beautiful face and fierce drive that she presented to the world was a vulnerable little girl with enormous self-esteem issues.
Perhaps one of the rewards of aging is a less forgiving body that transmits its warning faster—not as a betrayal, but as wisdom. Cancer makes one listen more carefully, too. I began to seek out a healthier routine, a little introspection, and the time to do my own writing, all of which are reflected in these pages.7
Joan Anderson married young, raised a family, and had a career as a journalist and author. When she was around fifty, her husband got a job in Chicago, so they sold the family home in New York State. She then shocked both of them by deciding not to join him. Instead, she took a vacation from her marriage and role as mother and caregiver to spend time alone at their cottage on Cape Cod. Her book, A Year by the Sea, is the story of her year of self-discovery and her journey back to herself.
Jungian analyst and author Jean Shinoda Bolen had separated from her husband of nineteen years and was going through a period of uncertainty when she received in the mail a mysterious envelope from a complete stranger. (This is exactly the kind of synchronicity that so frequently occurs during our Chiron Return.) Inside was an invitation to go on a spiritual pilgrimage to Europe in search of the sacred feminine. This journey led to a spiritual awakening and her exquisite memoir, Crossing to Avalon.
While women, thanks to science, are giving birth later in life, there is still something deep in our psyche that knows that this period is indeed the end of our fertility. For past generations, menopause signaled the end of being a woman. In 1900, the average life expectancy for females around the world was about forty-five, so many women didn't even experience menopause; the ones who lived past that age were considered old. We carry those stories in our cells.
Although there is much to celebrate during this period, there is also much to mourn, and we need to make time to do that. We may no longer be able to have children after fifty, but in many ways, this is our time to give birth to ourselves and to create lives that reflect the person we have become.
At the same time that women are going through menopause, men are having their own version—male menopause. Often referred to as andropause or “man-opause,” it is associated with a slow, steady decline of testosterone. The symptoms are not as dramatic as for women but can include nervousness, depression, fatigue, insomnia, and sometimes even hot flashes and sweats. While women are looking to the outer world (the workplace, creative projects, or returning to school) to satisfy their emerging drives, men are often drawn more toward family and the home.
With goals, hormones, and lives all changing, it's no surprise there are so many divorces between people in their early fifties. If there are problems in a relationship, then they will most likely surface during this period; relationships don't necessarily have to end, but they may need to be renegotiated.
The Chiron Return is a major threshold crossing, where the past is transformed in our attitude to it, and we can experience a new beginning, often with a renewed sense of the spiritual dimension of life.
The Chiron Return takes us back to whatever has not been healed, and it is not unusual for difficult memories and traumas to surface. These are often connected to family patterns that have continued for generations. Let's face it; there are some things we're just not ready to look at until we're fifty and have experienced our share of losses, betrayals, and disappointments. Something within us seems to soften at this age and allow us access to the necessary wisdom and compassion.
In her book Chiron and the Healing Journey, Melanie Reinhart writes about the Greek word kairos. “The word means opportunity, the right moment, when the timeless . . . nature of an experience may suddenly reveal itself, releasing a process which was previously frozen or stuck; a dam may give way, enabling the river of our life to continue flowing.” The Chiron Return is an excellent time to enter therapy or embark on a spiritual practice, but it's important to remember that this is not an intellectual process. It is less about analyzing or fixing and more about healing, embracing, and forgiving. We can seek help, but ultimately at our Chiron Return, we must heal ourselves; the change must come from within.
What Works: In Greek mythology, Chiron was known for his compassion, so the most powerful thing we can do at this time is to let go of the tyranny of perfection and the habit of comparing our insides to the botoxed, airbrushed outsides of others. We do that by loving ourselves for who we are and not for what we do or have. This is not ordinary self-love; it's radical self-love, radical self-forgiveness, and radical self-acceptance. I'm not suggesting this is easy; it's a lifetime process. But for those of us who are hard on ourselves (and sometimes others) and who have not forgiven ourselves (or others), the Chiron Return is a gateway into rectifying this.
The ancient Hawaiian prayer Ho'oponopono means: “I'm sorry, please forgive me, I thank you, and I love you.” I can think of no better metaphor or message for the Chiron passage. By making peace with ourselves, our past, and the people in our lives, we are liberated to live more freely and fully in the years to come. That is the great gift of the Chiron Return.
What Doesn't Work: Unresolved issues, old traumas, and shame do not just disappear; they fester. When they are not dealt with, they can lead to addictive behavior or chronic illness. The Chiron Return is the ideal time to work on these issues, and compassionate mentors and healers who can help us often come into our life.
The wonderful thing about our fifties is that we're old enough to have acquired experience, skills, and some wisdom, but still young enough to do just about anything. Okay, well, maybe not become an Olympic ice skater or a prima ballerina, but there is still so much ahead of us. In fact, there is no other period in our lives when we have both a wealth of experience on one hand, and on the other a significant amount of time to create something of value. What a fabulous place to be.
The biological calendar has been reconfigured so that people are physically younger than their chronological age. This has created a whole new stage in the life cycle—a period of personal renaissance inserted somewhere after middle age but before old age.
Even more than during other cycles, we need down time, soul time; time to mourn, digest, and process old wounds and the portion of life that is coming to an end. The feelings and memories that need to surface can only do so in a quiet and safe environment.
Even if we don't do formal meditation, taking time to be still or walk in nature helps us to process. Consider a ritual that involves the burning of some old relic or old love letters. Go through old photos, throw some out, and create a photo album with the rest. Or visit a childhood place. Participating in a shamanic journey, pilgrimage, or spiritual retreat can be profound at this time. Or do a simple full moon ritual during which you write a letter to the old self you are leaving behind.
Bathrobe days are always a treat, but they are especially helpful during a Chiron period. For me, it's the perfect way to unwind, tune out the world, and reconnect with myself. I give myself permission to do anything I want or absolutely nothing at all. Sometimes I stay in bed, reading my favorite magazines or a juicy novel. There is usually a bubble bath involved, naps, and great snacks. No guilt or inner critics allowed.
People with Chiron prominent in their charts are often healers, teachers, mentors, or the heroes who bring a new vision for the future. Like Chiron, they may have been orphaned, wounded, rejected, or sacrificed by their family or by society.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi both had a prominent Chiron and both used nonviolence to communicate their message. Barack Obama's Chiron is in the first house; he is very much associated with the mythology of this planet.
An important change developing here introduces seven years in which more and more the answer to your problems will be found within yourself, less and less in the outer world.
—Grant Lewi, Astrology for the Millions
The closing Saturn square comes at the end of the Chiron Return; in fact, they overlap. It can feel confusing at times; the Chiron experience is profound and emotional. Saturn's arrival brings reality and responsibility. It's necessary to make room for both energies. Saturn is the scaffolding, the framework on which we construct our life. That includes the stories we repeat to ourselves and others. We may have outgrown certain aspects of ourselves, yet our outer life may not reflect it; during this time, we have the ability to bring them into alignment.
As we move toward our Second Saturn Return, it is not so much building as eliminating and consolidating.
At age twenty-seven, we experience our first Progressed Lunar Return, which lays the groundwork for our Saturn Return at twenty-nine. Now, twenty-seven years later, we have another; this one is the harbinger of our Second Saturn Return at fifty-eight.
During our twenties, our reference points are our parents and their values; those values begin to alter as we get in touch with who we are and what we want to create in the world. At fifty-four, there is another shift—one less centered on the outer world and our responsibilities and more about our inner life and what makes us happy.
The Moon is our mood, our emotions, and, just as we did at twenty-seven, we get a feeling about who we will become at our Saturn Return. We are pregnant with something, and if we tune in, we can feel the stirring of a new life forming. It is a listening time, a learning time.
The Moon contains immense amounts of information about who we are on the deepest level. It is our emotional life and origins, even what we experienced in the womb. Breaking old patterns are easier now, especially those based on the demands of others.
In her book, Chiron and the Healing Journey, Melanie Reinhart wrote about how we are reparenting ourselves during the first few years after the Chiron Return that coincides with the Progressed Lunar Return. At the same time, we may be dealing with our aging parents and still have children living at home. It's no surprise that issues around family and parenting surface. This can be a deeply healing time if we give ourselves permission to explore and process these emotions.
Documentary filmmaker Amy Hardie experienced a loss, an illness, and, ultimately, a healing at her Chiron Return; along the way she changed her story and her life. Amy is a science filmmaker who lives in Scotland; she has a beautiful family and work that she is passionate about. One night, she dreamed that her beloved horse died; the next morning, she woke to find out it was true.
Shortly afterward, just before her forty-eighth birthday, she had another dream in which her late partner, the father of her first child, told her she would die within a year. Racing against the clock, she set off to research dreams. In the beginning, she took a purely rational and scientific approach. Later that year, she was diagnosed with a rare lung disease, and medical tests showed that she had only 60 percent lung capacity. She spent time in a hospital, but the medical world couldn't help her. Only after visiting a shaman in Edinburgh was she finally able to heal and to celebrate her forty-ninth birthday.
The Edge of Dreaming is a deeply personal documentary that shows Amy at every stage of her journey; at home with her family, learning about the death of her horse, her search for help via the medical community, and the session with the shaman.
What struck me about her story was that it contained many symbols connected with Chiron. Chiron himself was half horse; horses are associated with shamanism. Like the planet Chiron, the horse represents a bridge between the visible world of form (Saturn) and the distant world of the unknown and the unseen (Uranus). Amy went from being someone who made scientific-type films (she has worked with stem-cell researchers) to researching death for a documentary set in a hospice.
Tom Shadyac, the Hollywood director of such mega hit movies as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, and Bruce Almighty, was living a life most of us can only imagine. His home was a seventeen thousand square-foot mansion, he flew on private jets, and he went to A-list parties with Hollywood royalty. Yet he experienced a sense of emptiness.
“I was standing in the house that my culture had taught me was a measure of the good life,” Tom recalls in his documentary I Am. “I was struck with one very clear, very strange feeling: I was no happier.”
In 2007 (at the age of forty-nine), he had a traumatic bike accident that resulted in excruciating post-concussion syndrome. It was so horrific that he began to welcome the thought of death. “Facing my own death brought an instant sense of clarity and purpose,” he says in his film. “If I was, indeed, going to die, I asked myself: What did I want to say before I went? It became very simple and very clear. I wanted to tell people what I had come to know. And what I had come to know was that the world I was living in was a lie.”
Two burning questions led him to begin filming I Am just five months after his accident. “What's wrong with the world, and what can we do about it?”
The film I Am is a series of conversations with some of our most profound and respected thinkers, such as David Suzuki, Noam Chomsky, Colman Barks, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Lynne McTaggart. Shadyac began a quest to discover what would make him happy and to find out what is wrong with the world. As a result, he changed his lifestyle dramatically.
He traded his mansion for a modest mobile home, chose to bike to work, and now flies commercial. He says in the film that he's never been happier. “I started to wake up to certain hypocrisies in my life about ten or twelve years ago, and I started shifting things as I asked [myself ] more and more questions. . . . The bike accident is what compelled me to share my journey.”
By 1988, I had owned my restaurant in Greenwich Village for fourteen years, and it was doing really well. After many years of working double shifts and doing just about everything from bussing tables to baking and bookkeeping, I had a solid staff and some freedom; I was even making money. Plus, a few years earlier, I had bought a house on Long Island and finally had time to spend there. Life was good. Then I went and opened another restaurant. Oy vey! What was I thinking?
I had wanted to open a second restaurant for quite a while, but the restaurant business is hard and lonely, and I was concerned about taking on another one by myself. My sister suggested that we open one together in the Berkshires (in western Massachusetts), where she lived, which was about three hours away from New York City.
In the town of Great Barrington, we found an old coffee shop and renovated it. It was my dream restaurant; it had red oak floors, wainscoting, and Laura Ashley wallpaper. It was twice the size of my place in Greenwich Village, and it even had a bar. While we were jam-packed in the summer (the Tanglewood Music Festival, Kripalu Yoga, and Canyon Ranch were all nearby), business died during the winter. Needless to say, I hadn't done any market research. I poured all my money into trying to keep it going. Meanwhile, I was going back and forth on the train every week and had no days off or down time. It was just like the early days, except now I was older, had more to lose, and I was frightened instead of fearless.
Then something interesting happened, which often does in those years leading up to the Chiron Return. I became friends with a woman whom I met in Great Barrington. She and her husband lived in Manhattan but had a weekend home in the Berkshires, and I would often drive back to the city with them on Sunday nights. One evening, on our way back, my friend read out loud from an astrology book; it was Steven Forrest's The Inner Sky.
Steven's book was a revelation. His language was poetic, and his images profound; he described the planets, signs, and houses in a way that brought them alive. I borrowed the book and saw that my friend had written his phone number in the back.
I called Steven for a natal reading, then for another that covered what was currently going on. My life was falling apart, but those couple of hours on the train each week going up to the Berkshires were like gold; I listened to my taped readings or read astrology books by authors such as Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas. A whole new world was opening up for me; a world of mythology, magic, wisdom, and inspiration.
I closed the restaurant in the Berkshires in the fall of 1990. Back in the city full time, I struggled to keep my original restaurant going; it had always been popular, but the economy in the early nineties still hadn't recovered. The restaurant needed new equipment, such as an air conditioner, but I no longer had the funds. I began looking around for a buyer.
At the same time the restaurant was winding down, my interest in astrology was growing. I began studying astrology and attending astrology conferences. I wasn't thinking of it as a career; it was something I loved, so I embraced it. The fact that it wasn't contaminated by any of my problems or financial pressures was a welcome relief.
In the fall of 1994, during the peak of my Chiron Return, I experienced a series of losses; my mother died, my beloved cat Tasha died, and the restaurant hit bottom. I finally realized that I just couldn't do it anymore and decided, buyer or no buyer, I would have to close. I set a date in late February 1995, so all the loyal customers would have a chance to get their final piece of peanut butter ice cream pie or warm gingerbread with fresh whipped cream.
The New York Times did an article about the restaurant closing; not only were we busy, but a buyer came through at the last moment. I was able to pay all my bills and had enough money left over to live for a few months.
I felt absolutely lost and completely disoriented. For twenty years the restaurant had been my life, my identity, and my community. I didn't know who I was without it. I remember walking home one night after spending the day cleaning out the restaurant once it was closed.
“Dear god,” I remember thinking, “I'm too old to be a waitress. What in the world am I going to do now?” I wish I could tell you it was a smooth transition, but it was pretty ragged and involved several part-time jobs and many false starts. I'm not only a late bloomer; I'm also a slow learner. So it took me a while, but little by little a new life began to unfold.
Uggie is the name of the Jack Russell terrier who received raves and an honorary Oscar for his performance in The Artist. Uggie was rejected by his first two owners and was on his way to the dog pound when Omar Van Muller took him home as a foster dog. Von Muller, a dog trainer, noticed that Uggie was smart and willing to work, so he began training him. He has had several roles, but his big break was The Artist. He was fifty years old in dog years and having his own Chiron Return at the time.
Lauren was divorced at forty-three, at the peak of her midlife. That's also when her life began to unravel. Lauren was a talented artist, textile designer, and jewelry maker who lived in upstate New York. Financial pressure forced her to close her design studio and dissolve her business.
She found a job in retail, but (at forty-five) she tore a ligament in her foot, and it was difficult to stand. She quit her job. She sold her beloved loom, the rare silversmith tools handed down from her father, and other possessions. Her daughter went to live with Lauren's ex-husband, which Lauren found heartbreaking. Finally, she just couldn't support herself. Her sister offered her a refuge in Brooklyn; just a tiny room with no window, but it was a sanctuary—a place to rest and recover. She was utterly exhausted.
It was during her Chiron Return that she began to heal. After several months of “recovery,” Lauren decided to look for work. Due to her design background, she was able to get a job selling luxury Tibetan rugs at a high-end department store. The situation wasn't perfect, but she stayed there for a two and a half years and learned as much as she could. She appreciated the beauty of the rugs and discovered that she was really good at selling them; plus, she found that she could make excellent money.
Based on that experience, she landed a position in another store, again selling rugs. Lauren moved into her own apartment. She was able to help support her daughter, who was now in college. For a while, Lauren's mother came to live with her until Lauren could find a suitable assisted living facility. Lauren even began to make art again.
She is now stronger and happier than ever before. “I just couldn't get it together financially. I didn't know what a goal was. Having goals totally changed my life. I can make plans now; I have options. This period broke an old pattern.”
At eighteen, Karol joined the Sisters of the Holy Cross. One of the benefits of becoming a nun is the education that's available. Karol completed her BA (in sociology), then her master's degree in theology.
In her mid-forties, she took a two-year sabbatical from St. Mary's College (Indiana), where she was dean of students, to come to New York City and complete her PhD in higher education administration at NYU. St. Mary's was grooming her to be president, thus the need for the PhD. While in New York, Karol realized that she didn't want to return to South Bend, Indiana, and work as a college administrator.
Karol had already published several books, and what she really wanted was to remain in New York City and write. It was a huge decision; she had been a part of the Sisters of the Holy Cross for thirty-three years. Around this time, she was diagnosed with a fibroid tumor. She remembered reading that fibroids were caused by blocked creative energy. That settled it.
It was during her Chiron Return that she made the decision leave the order and remain in New York. She didn't give up her vows; she joined the Sisters for Christian Community, which is a contemporary, self-governing organization whose members live independently. Karol went on write several more books and never looked back.