What Will Highlight Your Twilight?

Click on the sunset image to inquire.

You don't have to know what your natal chart is, or, for that matter, what any natal chart is, to thoroughly enjoy The Astrology Of Midlife And Aging. Author Erin Sullivan, consultant and teacher, has made all the difference to hundreds of clients, it would appear, since she started her career in the 1960s. Plain language and plenty of familiar references make new information seem like ideas you heard before. If you are already interested in astrology, you will enjoy this big picture birds eye view of what you have seen before, but only from a personal point of view.

Maybe that partially explains why she has done so much research and, in this book, writing, about the so-called revolutionary period of American history that combined flower children, assassinations, your basic !lollapalooza! shot-across-the-bow of good old "USA Enterprise." (Naming the ship is my idea. Sullivan would never say anything so silly.)

Although the book's copyright is 2005, you will think "how little you knew, Erin Sullivan," when you take into account the current financial crisis worldwide as a symptom of conditions in the heavens and earth during the '60s.

Whether you were an earth-mother, or a child of one of those many Vietnam war heroes who were never treated honorably, you will get goose bumps reading Sullivan's pages on generational inheritances and points-of-view. If you do not agree with the author's convictions about influences of planets like Uranus, Pluto and Leo and where they were then and now, you will marvel over the recent history she helps readers understand in a new and, to me, enlightening way.

I believe in organic connections between the earth, its inhabitants, and its place in the cosmos. I found my own disparate thoughts and observations about, say, people born between 1956 and 1972, given cohesiveness.

Here is one of my favorite passages about that age group: "Generally, the people with Pluto in Virgo (born 1956 to 1972) have not and do not find their nuclear families to be a nest of neuroses - even if they are such, the level of concern over parental influence is not as strongly focused as with the Pluto in Leo (born between 1937 and 1956) people. For the Pluto in Virgo people, individual families are unrecognizable by the old definition, and though many of them have emerged from exceptionally unconventional families (that is, the old norm is broken), some even from horribly dysfunctional families, they are largely disinclined to censure the parents themselves and are more inclined to lay blame on a more collective level and on a more existential, cosmic level. They are a more accepting group - they understand inherently that there is a fate to things, a time of life, and a job to do."

Sullivan writes about each generation's aggregate personality and how we are all influenced over time to reflect these characteristics. But, of course, the purpose of the book is to offer a down-to-earth approach to making the most out of whatever generation you were born into. And, I found that by comparing my experience with patterns described about various age groups over time, I could add or subtract from the norms based on personal experience particular to the events in my life.

A poem reprinted near the end of the book is by the late Dorothy Sayers, who in addition to poems, was a marvelous Christian-faith writer, and mystery series author:

As I grow older and older,
And totter towards the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.

The book will not advise on what sun-sign you should go to bed with; nor does it enter into anything like the silly daily horoscope-advice genre.

It does, however, make you smile a bit more when you look up at the stars on a cloudless night.