The Grief of Dignity
Sometimes the hardest part of healing is getting exactly what we trained for, what we asked for, what we longed for. For the last six months, Venus has wound her way back and forth through Aries and Pisces, like a field nurse in a battlefield, taking respite where she can in boundless Pisces but with the shroud of Saturn hanging ominously overhead.
In my own life I have felt the machinations of this wearisome Venus retrograde cycle, multiple intense relational losses that gruesome world events have punctuated with hammer blows. A daily series of heartbreaks amplified by a fallen Mars retrograde through maternal Cancer. Miscarriage(s of all kinds). The echoes of mothers weeping overseas washing up on our shores like broken glass.
Meanwhile, Jupiter, steward of “big T Truth” has been split down the middle in-hall-of-mirrors-Gemini for over a year. This transit has brought more questions than answers. One on hand, Jupiter in Gemini has us embracing the dialectical, the non-binary, the both and. Multiple truths can exist at once! On the other hand, we’ve been navigating the illusory, AI psyops and political prestidigitation that leave us wondering who has our best interest at heart. In our personal lives we may have been subject to maddening internal conflicts of desire and understanding.
2025 began as something of a comedic horror, funny only in the magnitude of its badness. Astrologers anticipated the landscape, given this devastated chart. A sky so lacking in what we call “essential dignity” leaves us to go searching for our own.
Dignity simply means “worthiness,” a concept I’ve been working with for over a decade now since my entry into seminary in 2012. I began my theological journey with the Unitarian Universalists who maintain the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” as their First Principle. In a Preaching and Worship class I learned the word “worship” comes from the Old English weorthscipe, which literally means “to acknowledge the worth of something.” Essentially, what we worship is a reflection of what we value.
Planets in signs of fall or exile reveal when we’ve been worshipping the wrong things. Natives with planets in fall or exile are often wonderful truth-tellers and bellwethers for when we’ve lost our way. In the last year we’ve been face-to-face with the demons of genocide, oligarchical scapegoating of the poor, and climate crisis. Like boulders plummeting downhill, these forces seem unstoppable and also expose our complicity in loosening them in the first place. How could it have gotten so bad? Life has also been shining the light on some of my own shadows, casting into sharp relief the disparity between where I am and where I wish I was. Part of this process has been recognizing my own misplacement of value in things that aren’t really for me– false worship.
At long last, our stabilizing benefic planets, Venus and Jupiter, are moving from these places where our idolatry is exposed. On June 6th, Venus went home to her sign Taurus, and on June 9th, Jupiter will triumph in the sign of his exaltation, Cancer. These places restore Venus and Jupiter’s dignity, giving value to pleasure, stability, nurture, and all things that sustain life. As I’ve wrestled with the ways in which I want to cultivate life, relationship, and family, and as I move the needle closer to what is best for me, there’s a flavor of grief called “I didn’t know it could be this good.” When we are deep in the process of identifying what strategies are no longer working to meet our needs, I don’t know that we can always anticipate what getting those needs met feels like. It can feel as awful as awesome.
As the benefics move into their places of dignity, it’s a worthwhile reminder for me that sometimes discovering what we value is as much a grief process as it is a pleasure process. It’s ok to mourn when we finally feel what it means to be in right- relationship with ourselves and others. It can be overwhelming.
I hope that you will feel all the feelings that arise around the dreams deferred. Sometimes we must grieve those dreams over and over until we arrive at peace. Sometimes we get second chances, and we get to make new choices that allow us to fulfill our wildest desires. Herein lies healing, the painful and wonderful repair of discovering our true dignity.
On July 11-13 I’ll be leading a weekend long workshop in Tucson, Signs of Empathy. This three-day immersive experience at Cosme Astrology. Together, we’ll explore empathy through astrology and the NVC method—finding the places where our personal needs and the world’s needs meet. To register, click here.
If you can’t make it to Tucson, join me for a 90-minute webinar on Signs of Empathy on June 28th at 1pm MT. Get your ticket here.