In this series, we're taking a look at the twelve astrological houses as a very easy to use timing technique. People struggle with the houses more than anything else when learning astrology because people get the twelve signs and the twelve houses confused. Natural houses, the scheme of equating Aries with the first house and so on, especially, gets people confused because, then, houses starts to feel like just another layers of signs.

Really, the astrological houses are your orientation here on Earth. They are not the signs. The houses, because they show orientation here on Earth, must be interpreted through your lifespan.

The first house, the second house, and the twelfth house are about early life. The tenth house, the eleventh house, and the ninth house are about maturity. Today, we will talk about the houses of late life or the houses of elderhood. They are the seventh house, the eighth house, and the sixth house. Together, these are the houses of transitions, collective responsibility, and labor and all three of them speak to issues that you cannot face until you approach the last third of your life.

The seventh house

I know that most of us learn about the seventh house as the house of relationships and other people. That is one of the significations of the seventh house, because the seventh is opposite from the first, but the seventh house representing one's relationships is just one meaning of the seventh house. This one meaning of the seventh house has become so commonplace that it's actually kind of taken over its more startling significance.

The seventh house actually represents death. That's one of the things that it speaks to. It's the house where the Sun sets, the house of transitions, and the house of letting what you need to release go. This significance of the seventh house is probably why you might notice that a lot of people move when they go through seventh house transits.

As the angular house of the three houses of late life, the seventh house gives us the primary motivation that informs your latter years. Your elder years are the years when you will confront your own mortality. You have understood that you will not be around forever for your entire life but, your senior years and your years of elderhood, are the years that are full of transitions, cutting the self that you constructed for people around you, and finding what remains.

You make plans—you do—and you change those plans too. You worry about where you will go. You question who you will be as people who you didn't know you changed yourself to accommodate transition out. You let go of the power that you claimed during your years of maturity because you realize that it's time to pass that power down. In your elder years, you become your relationships more while simultaneously contesting your ideas about who you had to be for others.

Now, I'm in my thirties. I haven't gotten to this juncture of life yet but I've observed my grandparents who have and talk to my parents who are starting to get there. I've noticed that, during your last years, it's not about what you do or what you're capable of or what you can control. It's about who sticks around. I've noticed that the wisest elders don't try to manage their legacies but, instead, try to repair their relationships because, when you're old, the truth of your relationships becomes real to you.

There's certain things about how you raised your kids, which neighbors you got to know, and how you built your marriage that remain hidden to you until you are old. For example, I'm not sure that my grandma really understood her children until she reached her nineties. How could she? She had been the one to raise them.

The seventh house is also the house of big transitions and moving. A lot of people move when they experience big transits to the seventh house. These last few years, I've watched my grandparents prepare for the big transition in her last years, three of them making that transition through, and it does look like moving. It's a lot of getting rid of stuff and choosing what is most important by giving those important things away: jewelry, family photos, her sewing machine. She's chosen her grave and looked at enough photos of it to imagine how she will lay almost like a new bed in a new house. There's the chaos of moving but also the tidying, the closing out of a chapter of life that she doesn't plan to return back to.

The eighth house

The eighth house is the succedent house of the three houses which represent your later years of life. As the succedent house, the eighth house affirms and supports the seventh house which is the house of transitions and death.

The eighth house is the stuff that you give away. It's the sewing machine, the photos, the archives that you have taken care of all your life that you bestow upon someone else for safekeeping. It's the responsibilities that you give away because they're not for you to carry anymore, because those responsibilities are still important and someone else needs to carry them now.

When you give responsibilities away, you are communicating something. You are communicating: this thing is very important and you must take care of it.

That's the thing about shared responsibilities, right? They grow in importance when they are shared. Everything that we take care of or manage on our own is important to just us. We give away control and share responsibilities only when those issues are important enough for us to share. When you give away a sewing machine, it's no longer just a sewing machine. The sewing machine becomes the craft of sewing, repairing, and making the clothing that protects a family's dignity. When you turn the tools that you have used to craft your life into an inheritance, you giving instructions on what is worth keeping and teaching a set of values that the person who you share with will make their own.

And when you inherit something, a responsibility that someone managed for you becomes a site of collective struggle. The home, the car, the old books were a safety net, mobility, and knowledge that your grandparents had been managing for you. When they give those things to you, when you inherit them, they become strategies of survival. Old, random objects become meaningful when they are given.

The sixth house

The sixth house is the cadent house of the three houses which describe your later years or elderhood. As the cadent house, the sixth house is where planets go when they fall away from or depart from the angle of the seventh.

The sixth house, sometimes called the house of health, is not really the house of health or wellness. The sixth house is the place of illness and of disability.

Aged bodies are disabled bodies. We all get there eventually. We don't really understand our bodies, not completely in its full story, until we become disabled. We only start to learn about how the heart is connected to the liver by motion, how stretching or sleeping or eating impacts the deepest layer of our bodies, when we get old enough to see what we've taken for granted start to fail.

The sixth house is also the house of labor because, as the place of illness, it shows us the consequences of our labor. Our hearts that have worn down from the pressure of making life or death decisions, our livers which absorb the smoke of manufacturing, our knees which give out after years of hard work, and our kidneys which start to fail when we take medication to save our other organs. Illness is the evidence that you have used your body well.

The sixth house and the twelfth house are in opposition. You can sometimes see the issues of your twelfth house, the stuff that you were brought up to deny, when you get old enough to reach your sixth house. The way your body ages has to do with how you live, has to do especially with what you have denied. In illness, you face what you were brought up to deny.

The sixth house being part of the houses of elderhood is why I don't think that you really understand what your work means until you are old. Again, I have no experience in being a senior citizen. I can only speak to observations of my own grandparents and other old people. Based on what I've been told and what I have seen, the consequences of your work do catch up to you when you are old. I've seen the domestic role that my laolao escaped catch up to her in her elder years, heard stories of stomachs that fail to digest because of years of eating less to accommodate schedules and save money.