Biography and the birth chart - The Swimmer
I’ve been reading the (relatively) newly published biography of Roger Deakin, the writer and environmentalist. He wrote Waterlog which is one of my favourite books ever and which did a lot to kick-start the current popularity of outdoor swimming here in the UK. He also wrote about trees, made films, led environmental campaigns, restored a decaying farmhouse and the land around it. The biography is by Patrick Barkham, also a nature writer, and takes a somewhat experimental form. It centres Deakin’s own words, from his notebooks, along with comments and commentary from Deakin’s many friends, lovers, and family. His was that kind of voice, which wouldn’t be confined by a more traditional biography. And it was interesting to see the occasional disparity, where the notebooks told some magical story, and then a terse comment from a friend said “It wasn’t quite like that actually”. Interesting to read his words on his latest love and then have comments from that lover about when or how it had all gone wrong. Interesting to consider the generation growing up and awakening under the Uranus Pluto conjunction of the 1960s (Deakin was born in 1943), what they took for granted, how they changed the world.
So of course, I had to go looking for his chart. There’s no record of a birth time, even in the biography. So we have to ignore the angles and the houses, unfortunately. But even so, there is much to fascinate here.
The Moon - what nurtures us and allows us to feel safe - is happily exalted in Taurus. This is so clear, one of those textbook astrology moments. This is a man who bought some land with a decaying house on it, built it back up with his own hands, his own work. The Moon is trine Mars in Capricorn, energy directed into the practical. A very grounded connection. The house was hugely important to Deakin, who wrote about how much of himself he found there. He had a strong sense of place, a need to put down roots even though he also traveled widely - Jupiter in Cancer sextiling the Moon. And of course he wrote about nature, the waters of Cancer and the trees and earth of Taurus. He wrote about belonging.
And there’s his writing of course, in the Saturn Uranus conjunction in Gemini. Uranus trining Mercury in Capricorn. An authenticity, a lightness. He set much of the current popularity of nature writing intertwined with memoir in motion, bringing his own truth and even a Uranian experimental approach to his Mercury in Capricorn writing about nature. There’s a grand trine with Uranus, Neptune and Mercury - the poetic voice of a generation, an opener of the ways.
He seems to have been a larger than life figure in many ways, and to have sought that out as well as resisting it. So Chiron in Leo conjunct the North Node jumped out at me. Lots of creativity, but also some vulnerability, some insecurity which might have come across as wanting to be in control, to have everyone else do things his way. He’s of the Pluto in Leo generation, the generation who transformed creativity and self expression. Sometimes with a sense of entitlement along the way, and that comes out in the biography too. That Leo desire to live a mythical life, to create a magical life even if it meant using a little poetic licence. The Sun and South Node in Aquarius suggest that being ahead of his time was somehow a comfort zone. And an inability to be anything other than true to himself, to the benefit - mostly - of all.