My teenaged son’s best friend was hit by a car yesterday. Again. It was the fourth time. He’s relatively fine and the driver had insurance which will cover his hospital bill. Four times really is amazing, though. This last time happened near the entrance to the grocery store, the same grocery store where he was recently mugged. My son told me he was right there when some guy punched his friend and took the friend’s gallon of milk.

I haven’t seen this kid’s chart and who wouldn’t be curious now? Even without it couldn’t a person make some pretty accurate projections about what might be there, whether by natal aspect or transit? Pluto and Mars, Mars and Mercury… out in public, maybe the tenth house or the MC? It would be interesting to know if Saturn or Uranus were involved; should he be paying more attention or is this sudden and random?

Clearly, it’s much easier to look at an event and see it in the chart than it is to look at the chart and predict the outcome. That’s why “cookbook” explanations are rarely satisfying; it’s so hard to put energy into words. Each planet has an energy. The connections between them, squares, conjunctions, oppositions, trines, they’re just ways of combining those energies.

Each planetary energy has certain qualities and certain areas of influence. Put them together with another planet and its energy and you’ve got many possibilities to choose from. So you’ve got this energy, in your day, in your life, and it’s going to express itself. Or… you can express that energy FIRST, before it has a chance to happen to you. That’s one possibility.

Just imagine you’re walking out the door at the market with your big bag of lemons. You can think up hundreds of ways to use those lemons, lemon bars, lemon cream pie, hollandaise sauce. You could pull out those lemons, throw your hat down in front of you and juggle them for loose change! Or you can leave it all to fate, get hit by a car and make lemonade in your pants.

- satori

Do you look back on stressful events and try to pinpoint the astrology?