Back when I was twenty seven, I started to really think about how to live.

Before that, I was pretty much a person who could go along with almost anything. Maybe you relate or you don't. Maybe you're the kind of person who always has to have things a certain way in the home. I wasn't. I went along with plans to make some kind of collective housing situation with roommates who I really didn't know all that well, shared groceries with people who I ate really differently from, and let just about anyone use my bed as a place to crash if there was a need.

And I ate like shit. In childhood, we cooked but for a family. As a solo person, I was cooking too and if you asked me if I knew how to cook back then I would have said defensively that I did but, when it came down to what I was eating, it was acidic foods in the morning and skipping meals until night.

Around age twenty seven, our progressed Moon returns. I think that a lot of us confuse this astrological event, which is not a transit but a secondary progression, with the Saturn return which begins around ages twenty eight to thirty. However, the progressed Moon return is not the Saturn return. The two events are completely different.

Saturn is the planet of age and morality. The Moon is the planet of the body. The Moon and Saturn are very different planets even though they will tend to mirror each other in life since one returns every 28 years and the other progressed back to itself every 27. When our progressed Moon returns, we learn to eat, to make a home, and to understand what we remember.

What are progressions?

To start with, the progressed Moon returning is calculated based on secondary progressions. Secondary progressions are a timing technique where you take a look at how the planets transited each day after your actual birth and take a day to mean a year. Since the Moon's cycle is around 27-28 days, we usually run into its return around age 27-28.

A progression is not a transit. A transit is the way that the sky changes around you, the actions and circumstances and events that make up that thing that you call your life or time. A progression is a series of transits that have already occurred during your infancy.

The only planet which will progress fast enough to actually return within the scale of a human lifetime is the Moon. That is why, when looking at progressions, we tend to focus on the Moon.

The story that the progressed Moon tells throughout your lifetime is the story of how your body first learned to anticipate and hold its own in the world. These are your first memories. You learn how to be held, how to breathe, and how to eat in that order. Your digestive system made itself up, your body learning its innate creativity.

When the progressed Moon returns, nothing really happens to you. Instead, you start to realize the expectations that you saved in your bones. These expectations become very loud around age 27 and they'll have loads to tell you about what safety means to you, about what you mean when you talk about security. It will tell you what learning home felt like before you ever even knew that you had one at all.

While the Saturn return is you getting older, an actual event or an achievement of survival and age, the progressed Moon return is a resurrection. You realize that your baby body is still stored inside of yourself like the tiniest Russian doll in a stack. That's the body that you learn to hold when you move through a progressed Moon return.

Eating

Whenever we look at the Moon, we should take care to remember that the Moon is the planet which speaks to the physical body. Your body isn't abstract, you see. You eat and it materializes, accepting and absorbing and shedding. You have a weight and a form. You are really here.

Around age twenty seven, you learn to cook as an adult. That's really what this astrological event is about though it gets slightly more complicated when you think through what cooking for yourself as an adult really entrails.

A lot of us grow up cooking or cook before we turn twenty seven. We cook with our caregivers or at big gatherings of family and community groups. We know how to chop an onion, how to boil the water, and how to peel a potato but we're usually not in charge of the menu in those early childhood days of cooking.

When we get a little older, when we start working our first jobs, we cook too but that cooking might be experimental or strange. If we start to live on our own, then we face the question of what it is that we want to eat that we can afford to each by ourselves for the very first time. By then, we have woken all of these new interests and appetites, ones that didn't fit into the family home.

I don't think that the type of cuisine that each of us makes is always inherited. My mom, who learned to cook from a neighbor, learned several Jiangsu recipes back in Henan. Me, I grew up not having Chinese ingredients around me and only found them later, many of them syncretistic and diasporic, patching up what works and what doesn't.

Our friends and neighbors teach us how to cook, not just our parents. A lot of us use herbs, sauces, and vinegars that no one in our family uses or knows simply because we got hungry at someone else's house.

Before you turn twenty seven, I think that there's a lot of inclusion and experimenting and tasting going on. Before you are fully grown, you have to learn the world by letting people feed you. When you turn twenty seven, what happens is that you have eaten enough of the world to understand what works for you and the specific style of cuisine that you are capable of providing as yourself. You learn to cook for yourself as an adult, as a eater and a provider—a sensualist in the making.

Making home

Age twenty seven, the year of the progressed Moon return, is usually thought of as the year when you learn to construct a home for yourself as an adult. Some people move out around twenty seven which can mean a whole lot of things depending on who you are and who are folks are. You might be getting married, moving into your own home. You might be single as hell and living with roommates for the first time or the last time. You might live in a high cost of living area and you still live with your parents but you start to see your own room as your own.

Regardless, age twenty seven is going to be when you start to take your home life seriously. This is your home—the place where you gather people, the place that you relate to others from, the place where you rest.

You might start to have real desires about home around this age. Before you're twenty seven, you might let other people make choices about your home or you might grip hard onto those early life habits that help you control your space without supporting security in the real sense. At age twenty seven, you'll start to see which habits around control really do help you sense those boundaries that keep you secure and where you've anticipated a real lack of power.

Those real desires around home can feel very intense. You might suddenly get fed up with roommates, desperate for your own space. You might fight people at home more. You might find yourself trying to jump into home ownership even if you don't know what that means yet.

I think that a lot of us make some pretty surprising decisions around age twenty seven. We break up with long term partners. We get into long term relationships. We start to feel like the issue of home is not one that we can put off anymore, not one that we can allow people and circumstances to solve for us anymore. We start to sit down with ourselves and do the work of figuring how to construct safety step by step.

Family stuff

A big part of all of that, of making up home and learning to take care of yourself, is going to have to do with looking backwards in time. The Moon is always a nostalgic planet. During the progressed Moon return, a lot of us will start to really take a look at our upbringings and understand what happened for the very first time.

I see a lot of people do that exercise where you draw out your family in the shape of a tree and add in memories and descriptions so that you can see what you carry for your folks around this age. I think that this exercise can be useful even though I'm not usually the kind of person who likes to think of families as trees.

Really, what happens during the progressed Moon return is that memories that you thought you lost return back to you. You forgot something and you thought that you were living without that memory. Then, that memory comes back. When you encounter it, you're forced to recognize the reality that you've been living with that memory all along. There can be a sense that you've always known what you know about yourself during the progressed Moon return even though you feel like you're discovering a mystery for the very first time.

People realize shit. We realize that, "Oh shit, my parents neglected me??" around this year. We realize, "Wait, I actually did have so much support" around this time. We understand these things already but, because we haven't had enough space in adulthood to really take a look until that lunar progression which completes at year twenty seven.


After the progressed Moon return, we move into the Saturn return. By then, we have already started to walk and talk and eat like adults. We are ready to face Saturn, to face the fact of moving into true adulthood while deciding on our own goals and ambitions. To face Saturn, you have to deal with the Moon first. You have to eat as good as possible and get enough sleep, have to understand what it meant to learn how to eat and sleep in the home that you were given and what you want to make now that you're getting ready to come of age.