To grow older is to mature, like fine wine. Getting older, however, is not so fun, since most females are indoctrinated to prioritize their “looks” above all else.

Judi Dench, now 88, is one who knows this, and much else, that gradually seeps in with the passage of time.

Let me add one more gift of the fine art of aging, which I received from the world view I expanded into, during my 30s, when I began to absorb  the symbolic language of astrology. This is a completely other view of the relationship between space and time that engenders a plethora of cascading meanings across the decades for any person who pays attention to processing their experience.

In fact, within the astrological world view, the longer one lives, the deeper and more profound the meaning of the whole.

This is because the astrological world view does not view time as a single linear line, but as a multitude of curving lines, creating circles, enclosing spaces: many nested concentric cycles, with YOU as the center. These begin with the Moon (29.5 days) go out to Uranus (84 years) in one possible human lifetime — and beyond, to Neptune (165 years) and Pluto (248 years).

The larger the cycle, the greater the meaning. The meaning of a cycle IS the length of time it takes to carve out its own space. At least the wholeness of the 30 year (Saturn) cycle should be obvious to those who have reached that age and beyond. I remember my 20s, when my generation thought “you can’t trust anyone over 30.” Well, after 30, we soon reached the opposite conclusion: “Actually, you can’t trust anyone under 30, because they have not yet had the life experience to see that decisions, over time, yield consequences!”

Longer cycles are archetypal. Saturn, for women: Maiden (under 30), Mother (30 to 60), Crone (60 and above).

Again, the longer the cycle, the more of life is encompassed in the journey, the larger the meaning, the more profound the wholeness.

At 81, I am approaching my 84th year, and the completion of the first cycle of Uranus, highly aware, at this point, that I seem to be continuously processing memories and their interconnections, their various cycles within cycles, over the extended time and expanded space of my entire life. An extraordinary gift, to live this long.

Would love to speak with Judi Dench, and find out about the years leading up to her 84th, her completion of the cycle of individuation: URANUS.