I haven’t touched this series for a while but I actually got a request from someone that I finish this series. The Scorpio who reached out to me—thank you! I actually forgot that I started this series completely and your reminder made me remember to finish it.

The next house placements for the lunar nodes that I wanted to cover were for houses five and eleven. I want to let you in on a little secret: when I work with people who have their lunar nodes in houses five and eleven, I ignore the direction of the nodes completely. It doesn’t matter if the south node is the one in the fifth house or the north node. To me, the south node in the fifth house and the north node in the fifth house have a very similar impact. I don’t find it helpful when starting to work with people to treat it as opposing phenomena. It gets different later. I’ll get into that.

I find it really funny that we say that the fifth house is the house that describes our relationships to children that we have. You know what has a huge impact on your relationship with any children you have or meet? Your experience of being a child. This is one way I think of the fifth house—your time in childhood.

When there is a lunar node in the fifth house, whether that is the south node or the north node, we are going to be working with childhood.

Childhood is a state of dependency. Child don’t usually have full control over their own lives. They are naive to things that adults are not naive to and they are very sensitive to attachments. That’s the fifth house. It’s a place where attachment is eager and quick. It’s a place that needs and yearns for love.

The eleventh house is rather different in nature. The eleventh house is the outcome of the tenth house. This means that the nature of the eleventh house is to give support to the demands that the world around us makes of us and the ambitions that drive our paths through our futures. Responsibility is implied by the eleventh house. The eleventh house asks us, “do you know who your friends are?” The eleventh house describes a very different kind of love than the love of the fifth house. The eleventh house asks us if we are willing to build love into the future while the fifth house asks how we learned love in the past.

South node in the fifth house, North node in the eleventh house

The south node is actually the mark of regret. When it appears in the fifth house, there is regret in childhood. Well, we all have regrets when it comes to childhood. When the south node is in the fifth house, there is regret around the issue of having been a child in the first place.

There is something that wasn’t done or something that wasn’t done the right way. There are things that were not said or things that could not be taken back once they were said. There are things that we wished we did or things that we wish we never did. There are people we wish we never met or people we wished we knew.

When there is regret in childhood, there is regret in dependency. This means that the question the south node in the fifth house is actually interested in is the question of whether you can trust the ways in which you are supported.

A good place to start with the south node in the fifth house is actually with food. Do you believe that you will be appropriately nourished with the food that is available to you? How open are you to being given food or being fed by other people? Are you able to come into contact with your hunger or with your fullness?

We typically think of the eleventh house as the house of friends or associations, larger communities full of people who we don’t call kin but don’t call strangers. These are communities where we have a social role and a social purpose. Houses that are situated at the top of the chart actually have to do quite a bit with growing up. The north node in the eleventh house is about building love through the process of growing up.

When the south node is in the fifth house and the north node is in the eleventh house, we can’t solve our regrets from childhood by recreating the same scenarios or same scenes into adulthood. We actually have to let go of the values that we had to develop as children in order to perceive the world around us in a protected way a bit in order to allow those values to shift and grow. We have to let go of the idea that we can save someone else from their own helplessness and realize that, by understanding the boundaries between that person and ourselves, there are things people can figure out only when they are given the chance to exercise responsibility over their own lives.

The reason why food is a good way to work with this nodal placement is because it allows for the chance to ask someone “have you fed yourself first?” This question is a question around whether someone has taken on the responsibility of nurturing and feeding their own life.

South Node in the Eleventh House, North Node in the Fifth House

One of the reasons why I treat either of the lunar nodes in the fifth house in the same way when I am getting to know a person is because the north node in the fifth house can feel very similar to the south node being there. If the south node in the fifth house is about the mark of regret placed in the house of childhood, then the north node in the fifth house is the mark of perpetual yearning in the house of childhood.

The north node marks a place of life that we believe we are unsuited for. We have deep suspicions over the things described by the north node. We don’t believe that we can ever access the place that captures the placement. Having the north node in the fifth house also means that the south node, that mark of regret, is in the eleventh house. People who have the south node in the eleventh house are people who took on a lot of responsibility as young people. They are people who feel like they were not allowed to be young or to behave naively. North node in the fifth house people have doubted that pleasure or joy was ever meant for them.

If food is a good way to work with the south node in the fifth house then control is actually a good way to work with the south node in the eleventh house. Let me tell you—there is deep terror in the fifth house. Remember, this is the house of children and children are helpless.

There are a lot of things in life that might make us feel helpless: falling in love, losing a job, unpredictable events, asking for help. These are all things that challenge people who have north node in the fifth house. The reason why these things are harder is because they tend to assume that they need more control to survive their lives than one person can ever have. They may assume that they need the world to be more predictable than it will ever be.

The north node in the fifth house is about making desire come alive. Is it possible to grow into a place where we can want something wholeheartedly and tell the whole world about it even if that wish seems naive or childish? Desire is uncontrollable. What could it be like to just want without knowing whether we will get what we want? Could desire be a goal in and of itself?

So, these are really heavy things. They are really heavy topics and I’m writing about them in a heavy handed way here because I’m not talking to anyone directly or putting anyone in the spotlight personally. These are things that need a lot of gentleness to work with. That is why I work with the nodes in the fifth or eleventh houses the same way regardless of which direction they are facing.

When either of the nodes are in the fifth and eleventh houses, this tells me that we will learn more about the person when we give issues of childhood some space to breathe and some gentle encouragement. I don’t feel like it’s too important to differentiate between the two directions. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just my style. When either of the nodes are in the fifth house, joy and naivete and willful dependency can feel tightened or suffocated. A lot of what we do together might have to do with making self expression, in all of its bravery and carelessness, come alive.