Mercury and Saturn (Aspects and Transits): Writing Practice as a Spiritual Discipline

As I have been recommitting myself to my writing practice, I have been returning to a collection of books on the writing life that I have gathered over the years. It is strange, in a way, for writers to write about writing. Writing is simple. You sit down with a notebook or a computer, and you just start recording your thoughts.

Committing to doing it every day, the way you do when you have a writing practice, seems as trivial as committing to brush your teeth. When you have something really pressing on your heart that needs to be said, it can be that easy. When you dedicate your life to developing writing as a craft, it is not so easy. Without care, the well of inspiration goes dry after a day or two.

Finding myself out of words, I start to doubt the idea of a writing practice. "The world is full of chatter and noise," I think. "Am I helping anyone by opening my mouth when I don't have anything to say?" There have been times in my life when the answer to that question has been, "No." When I find myself without urgency or inspiration in those times, I close my notebooks and take up other work. There are times, however, when I need to treat writing as my craft, as something I practice the way a potter practices making cups and bowls. A potter doesn't wait until they are inspired to create. They sit at the wheel and do the work.

Why bother with a writing practice?

Dedication and consistency builds skill, but it isn't the only reason to practice. Returning to the page every day, regardless of how you feel about it can be sacred work. When you run through all of the easy material, you get bored. If you continue to sit through the boredom, you start to explore the corners of your soul that you hide under a flurry of activity.

In short, a writing practice can be like a meditation practice. The writer Natalie Goldberg has built a career exploring the similarities between her Zen practice and her writing practice.

The abbot at Thomas Merton's monastery understood this when he ordered Merton to make writing his daily labor. Though Merton, who had been a scholar before he became a monk, would have preferred to engage in the order's usual labors such as growing vegetables and brewing beer, the abbot knew that a writing practice could have the same soul-making properties as physical labor.

Who benefits from a writing practice?

If you have an aspect between Mercury and Saturn in your natal chart or you are going through a transit, progression, or profection year involving those planets, you might benefit from a writing practice.

Mercury rules writing (communication of all kinds), and Saturn is the planet of discipline. A writing practice is all about applying the virtues of Saturn to your communication. In time, the practice of bringing discipline to your words brings order to your thoughts and clarifies your perceptions.

Even if you don't have any aspects between Mercury and Saturn in your chart or by transit or progression, a writing practice can be a valuable remediation tool for a Mercury you're struggling with.

What does a difficult aspect involving Saturn and Mercury look like in a writing practice?

I have a close quincunx between my natal Mercury in Aries in the 9th whole sign house and my Saturn in Scorpio in the 4th house. The God of Order and the God of Communication do not work together easily in my mind. They struggle with each other. Mercury chafes under a diet of sameness. When I go too long without breaking up my routine, my mind works behind my back to create chaos and force change. Saturn in Scorpio, however, wants to go deep. It hungers for the revelations that come when I've pushed through boredom and am forced to confront the hard psychological truths behind it.

For me, one of the hard truths beyond boredom is that the value I hold for silence isn't entirely my own. I was raised in a small Christian denomination that teaches women should be silent in church. There are many churches where women are (almost) inadvertently silent, where only the clergy speak during services and only men are ordained as ministers. In my childhood churches, though, the main service was a Quaker-style meeting where people would speak as the spirit lead them, telling stories, reading bits of scripture, asking that the congregation join them in singing a hymn. For two hours a week, it was the order of the assembly that women should sit in silence.

Even as a child, I was never content with the reason "because God says so," and so I was left to muse on the other, frankly, pathetic reasons I was given for why women couldn't speak in church, such as: Women bring disorder to the service. Women aren't as educated as men. Women have inherited Eve's sin, and, my personal favorite, it confuses the angels.

My parents had the grace to send me to another church that had a woman youth pastor when I was a teenager, but the foolish lessons I learned when I was young haunt me whenever I sit down to write. They say that silence is a virtue. They say that anything that might cause disorder is best unsaid. They say that only a highly educated, refined, rational voice is worth listening to. They say that writing "like a woman" is unseemly. They say that those who are incapable of discipline should submit to those who are.

These voices are the demons I meet on the other side of boredom. They take small truths--such as my Mercury in Aries' love of pot-stirring--and they make a literally compelling argument that silence is the path of spiritual growth for me.

The insidious thing about it is that there is some truth to it. I have the sun and north node in Taurus. I am a person for whom the path of peace and serenity represents growth. Taurus is ruled by Venus, the Goddess of Beauty, and Taurus rules the throat. When the things I say stray too far from the path of beauty, I stray from my path. This is difficult to reconcile with Mercury in the sign of the Warrior.

What are the benefits of a writing practice?

This morning, I was reading about the path of the warrior as a sacred path for writers in Writing as a Sacred Path by Jill Jepson. She says that the virtues of a warrior's life--"discipline, courage, and the willingness to fight for truth are among the most admirable of virtues." They are virtues, she says, in the writing life also.

As someone with Mercury in Aries, fighting injustice and lies is especially important in my writing life, but everyone who engages in a writing practice benefits from the warrior's virtues. "Excellence in writing," Jepson says, "isn't only about voice and style. It is about finding the truest parts of ourselves and having the moral strength to never waver from what we hold sacred."

For me, the simple act of picking up a pen is an act of resistance. I am fighting the lies--still living zombie-like in my society--that women are not as worthy to be heard as men, that women aren't as capable of achieving the discipline of craft as our brothers, that fighting the lies that would silence us only creates trouble.

To me, it is a sacred truth that an individual should be judged on their own virtues, not on the gender they were assigned at birth or the gender they do or do not choose. The things that determine the quality of a person's character are things like honesty, courage, and, yes, discipline. Resisting the lies that would say otherwise is a truth I fight for by engaging in a writing practice.

It might be an easy thing to sit down with a pen and generate words, but having the courage to tell the truth every day, and to present in it in a way that is beautiful, that is a real craft worthy of refining.