I find it interesting that, a lot of the time, people ask me more about the signs associated with the lunar nodes more so than the houses. The reason why this is interesting is because the nodes change signs every year or so. They change houses every two hours.
The signs that the lunar nodes appear in are far more connected to your age group than the houses that they are in. This means that how the nodes interact with the signs they’re in change from age group to age group. In my series about the lunar nodes in the signs, I make note of that. I have only really worked with certain age groups and, so, I try my best to give an incomprehensive but somewhat comparative delineation of the nodes in the signs with patterns that I have observed.
I’m going to go through the houses and do the same. However, the nodes through the houses are not age group specific trends. They are more personal.
Houses six and twelve are often seen as inauspicious houses. Not only are they cadent, they are also averse to the horizon. Descriptions of the lunar nodes in houses six and twelfth often speak of service, of laboring for entire lifetimes, and of sacrifice or even martyrdom. One gets the sense that these are meant to be quiet houses who keep any dramatic flair within themselves to themselves.
There is meaning in having the lunar nodes in houses six and twelve and the people who have these nodes are fascinating as well.
People with lunar nodes in houses six and twelve are not sadder than most. They’re not bound to these lives of suffering. If it were so easy to identify suffering in a chart or in a life, then we wouldn’t need to live at all. Houses six and twelve sit in that section of the sky where the Sun resides just after sunrise and just after sunset. They’re houses in which you feel that the crux of transformation has already taken place. They’re part of the lives that we all live.
South Node in the Sixth House, North Node in the Twelfth House
Having south node in the sixth house and the north node in the twelfth house is a fight for time. You fight this fight with all of your claws out. You are hungry for time—time that you wouldn’t even know what to do with if you got your paws on it. You snarl at the loss of your time. All you know is that you need more time, that you’re too cramped in your space and life and that you’re yearning for the chance to just breathe, to let it out. To let yourself out.
Toni Morrison, who had north node in the twelfth house writes:
“And you learn how to use time. You don’t have to learn how to wash the dishes every time you do that. You already know how to do that. So, while you’re doing that, you’re thinking. You know, it doesn’t take up your whole mind. Or just on the subway. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in that packed train, where you can’t do anything anyway. Well, you can read the paper, but you’re sort of in there. And then I would think about, well, would she do this? And then sometimes I’d really get something good. By the time I’d arrived at work, I would jot it down so I wouldn’t forget.”
She wrote her first books while raising her kids. She would get up early in the morning, before the Sun rose, to write. This was her stolen time—that time before dawn. If you get up early enough, you get to steal a pocket full of time just for yourself back from the world.
And Toni Morrison knew suffering. She also writes:
“After I had written Sula. I’ve said I wrote The Bluest Eye after a period of depression, but the words “lonely, depressed, melancholy” don’t really mean the obvious. They simply represent a different state. It’s an unbusy state, when I am more aware of myself than of others. The best words for making that state clear to other people are those words. It’s not necessarily an unhappy feeling; it’s just a different one. I think now I know better what that state is. Sometimes when I’m in mourning, for example, after my father died, there’s a period when I’m not fighting day-to-day battles, a period when I can’t fight or don’t fight, and I am very passive, like a vessel. When I’m in this state, I can hear things. As long as I’m busy doing what I should be doing, what I’m supposed to be doing, what I must do, I don’t hear anything; there isn’t anything there. This sensibility occurred when I was lonely or depressed or melancholy or idle or emotionally exhausted. I would think I was at my nadir, but it was then that I was in a position to hear something. Ideas can’t come to me while I’m preoccupied.”
The sixth house, that house of labor, is where we fight our day to day battles. It’s where we do the dishes and remember to take out the trash on the right days. It’s where we clean the litter box and make sure that we have enough eggs to last us the week. It’s where we sweep the floor and remember everyone else’s birthdays.
And then, there’s the twelfth house. There’s what happens when we stop struggling. There is mourning here and depression here but, “when I’m in this state, I can hear things.” There is a voice that comes to us when we stop struggling, stop maintaining, and stop managing. This is north node in the twelfth house. It is the knowing that, when we cannot struggle anymore, that this is where and when we hear voices.
Twelfth house north node people—they’re not afraid to suffer. They know, in having suffered, that it is possible for them to find themselves in it. They understand that, in suffering, that they will neither be alone nor stagnant. They understand that there is great growth in suffering.
South Node in the Twelfth House, North Node in the Sixth House
And then there’s the people who have north node in the sixth house, south node in the twelfth house. There’s the people who already hear voices.
These are the people who find, amongst talking with others, that they are in the habit of stroking and protecting something that other people might have stopped believing in long ago—raw vision. These are the sometimes dilettantes who wander through the world believing in themselves. They pursue goals for which they have no qualifications nor experience and they, truly, don’t give a shit. They care only about possibility.
Another writer, Jorge Luis Borges, has north node in the sixth house and south node in the twelfth house. This is the writer who once said things such as “I am not sure I exist, actually”, “reality is not always probable, or likely,” and that “You have awakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand.” This is the writer who scripted fantastical cities and made paradoxes of logic come alive into character and story. This is the writer who tries his hardest to convince you that the impossible is possible and then impossible once more.
Borges also wrote this:
“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
This using of resource, this paying attention to the resources which are at our disposal, this noticing of opportunity when it is not presented but can be chiseling out when you scrape at just the right angle—this is the sixth house. Twelfth house south node, sixth house north node people are dreamers who are tasked with paying attention. They’re the kind of person who cries without using kleenex, who don’t realize that the ingredients in their kitchen are enough for a meal, and who forget that they can always ask for help.
Resourcefulness—sixth house north node people are learning that the dream is not just a dream that is awakened into but a reality that can be lived if fed with enough resources.
There is suffering in the sixth house as well. This is the house of work. However, sixth house north node people are unafraid of work. They yearn for it and they sigh in wonderful relief when they see the things that they imagined become real when they work for the resources that this vision requires of them. They work knowing that their vision is their only master. They love to get their hands dirty and their knees dusty.
The sixth house isn’t a sacreligious house. It’s not about serving anyone and everyone you come across. The north node in the sixth house is about learning through doing. You believe in this great big thing that no one else believes in or that everyone else believes in. It’s on you, by living day by day, to learn whether this thing can be real or dreamed. To do that, you must pay attention to the resources that are at your disposal.
