A Poet’s First and Second Saturn Returns

Saturn Return Stories from the writings of Nancy Fenn…

I bring you another one of my favorite saturn return stories …

Kay Ryan is an American poet whose life beautifully illustrates winning cooperation with the two most important astrology transits, the first and second Saturn Returns. The first Saturn Return comes (for all of us) between 28-30. This tremendously important transits asks us to find our authentic selves and give ourselves second birth so to speak, to leave our parents again, consciously this time, and their expectations, and begin to lead our own lives. If we succeed at this very arduous task, the second Saturn Return between 58-60 years old brings tremendous rewards.

Work hard at Saturn tasks and Saturn always delivers. The converse is also true; perhaps this is why many people die at around 60. I write these articles to help you get in the first group with Kay Ryan.

You are not reading this by chance.

Kay Ryan was born in 1945. At around 30, her first Saturn Return, she took time off for long bicycle ride in order to “find herself”. She was right on schedule with the task at hand. Everyone should do this between 28-30! Something about the pedaling, pedaling, pedaling reminded her of poetry. She had an epiphany, as many do at 30, and decided to devote her life to writing poetry.

Ryan took a job in the teaching field where she could work just two days a week and pay the bills. In order to live like this, she stripped her life down to the bare minimum.

For the next 30 years she wrote and wrote. Nothing much happened and she did not seem to ask for much to happen.

When she was around 60 someone gave a book of her poetry to someone that mattered in the literary world and soon Ryan’s work appeared in The New Yorker. Thus the second Saturn Return was positive payback time. Ryan had worked diligently at her authentic task and the reward was bound to come. Thirty years seems like a long time but Saturn wants us to focux on what is really important to us between 30 and 60, not what someone else wants. These are our mature, serious years when we bear the yoke and pull the plow. The harvest comes at 60.

Since Ryan’s breaks began at 60, according to poets.org, her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, and Parnassus, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006.

Since l971, the time of her first Saturn Return, Ryan has lived in Marin County in California.

Use Kay Ryan’s life as a classic example of how to win with Saturn Returns #1 and #2.