Tick tick….boom

Its always scary when someone you identify with comes to grief.. I had never seen the musical Rent nor heard of the writer Jonathan Larson before watching the movie carrying the same name as the musical he produced over the past few weeks on Netflix. At times all of the singing and dancing and frentic energy in it got a bit much for me.But I watched it through to completion yesterday when my own body was going haywire from energy overload and was so sad to read at the end that Larson died at the age of 35 of an aortic aneurysm..

The movie focuses on the year he is close to turning 30 which astrologically is related to one’s Saturn return. This marks the time we can meet a critical turning point between the public and private selves but also a time we may seek a new more authentic life path.. The movie does not show him ‘making it’ on Broadway but the personal and private struggles leading up to that, it also concentrates upon the Aids epidemic which touches him in all kinds of ways and most personally through his best friend falling ill around the time Jonathan is struggling to get a musical produced.

As an astrologer I was interested to look up his chart today and felt a wave of shock to read he was born the same day as me two years before in 1960… I have 7 planets in Aquarius but Jonathan had only two, the Sun and Mercury, his other personal plants occupied the two prior signs : Capricorn Venus cojoins both Saturn and Mars which is interesting as I also have Mars conjunct Saturn. At the moment both Venus and Mars are currently travelling very close together through the early degrees of Aquarius where his Sun Mercury conjunction lies, both planets square his natal Neptune and the current Venus Mars transit is echoing that.

Jonathan’s Moon in Taurus also squares his Sun and opposes natal Neptune in Scorpio which would relate to alot of the intense music (Neptune with a Pluto/Mars subtext) and emotion (Moon in aspect to Scorpio) that it conveyed.. Particularly poignant in the final scenes are his emotional tribute to his childhood friend, struck down by Aids.. Jonathan also had Jupiter in Sagittarius which is a very fiery high intensity energy as well.

Its the Mars conjunct Saturn that speaks of a held in explosive energy that may lead to such a thing as an aneurysm. Jonathan experience transiting Mercury going over those two planets in the month leading up to his death for at the time of his death Mercury had actually turned retrograde in the sign placement of Mars Saturn and Venus… Capricorn and was due to move back onto it.

Sadly his chart was weak in the water element. Capricorn is not the most expressive of signs and Aquarian planets may come off as cerebral, wacky or aloof. The astrology site Astro Theme has this to say about it :

Your natal chart shows a lack of the Water element, with only 5.79% instead of the average 25%. Whether you are aware of it or not, affective values bring about problems, for you or your close friends. In general, a lack of Water does not necessarily mean that you are unable to love as much as others do. However, you may find it difficult to express the deepness of your heart and of your feelings. In the best cases, you come to terms with it, you adjust, you manage to show more affection or, why not, you pretend to be really affected! In the worst cases, you get into the terrible habit of repressing these essential values and you tend to forget that they are the basis of the richest and strongest bonds between human beings.

This remoteness and lack of overtly expressed emotion may betray the truth of their heart and its intensiry he carried shown by Neptune in Scorpio…. His struggle to articulate is most especially shown in the movie in the way he relates his girlfriend and the frustrations she experiences around his obessesion with both his writing and creativity.

Anyway I was not sure whether to post this or not. It seems to me so poignant he lost his life at the age of 35 but the gift of his music and creativity lived on. Apparently he was one of the first musical theater writers with work that featured minorities or those on the so called ‘ ‘queer’ side, this is most certainly a strong expression of that Aquarian/Uranian energy.. Just looking at Jonathan the energies make sense to me, he carried a very powerful creativity and sometimes those who shine so bright creatively may not last for long on this earth.