There’s a question we all ask ourselves at one point or another somewhere along our journey, sometimes in deep distress, or maybe just in utter confusion - what on earth am I doing here?
And it’s a good and valid question, because life - especially these days - doesn’t always make a lot of sense. It’s easy to look around at the state of things and wonder why we ever chose to come here, especially on the days when life is really punching us in the face. For many of us, life just feels like one trial after another, like we’re just managing to keep our heads above water most days, and if that’s all this is then what’s the point? There must be more to it than just this.
Just the asking of that question in those moments of exasperation hints towards a deeper knowing - a sense that there must be something we’re here to achieve, or something we came here to do, if only we could just remember.
The ancients believed we could. They taught that every soul enters this life on a mission of its own choosing - a purpose agreed to before birth, forgotten on arrival, and written into the sky at the moment of our first breath so we could find our way back to it. And in charting the map written in the heavens, they watched two points above all others - one that holds everywhere our soul has already been, and one that points toward the reason it came back.
Those two points are still in your chart right now, sitting exactly where you left them, guiding you towards your purpose in this life.
If you want to know what they say, keep reading, friend.
Never miss a word.
Visitors on a Mission
Late last year, poet James McCrae published a stunning piece called “Instructions Before Visiting Earth.” It’s written as a kind of briefing that a soul might be given on its way into a human body, advising any soul that finds itself separated from source and manifest into material form, not to panic, because the condition is only temporary. Human incarnation allows the soul to experience separation for the purpose of growth, it reminds the reader. It says you’ll forget your true nature, and you’ll fall in love, and you’ll lose what you love, but none of it will harm the deeper thing you are. Be a good guest while you’re here. Tread lightly. Give more than you take.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing below:
McCrae’s poem reminds us all of something it’s easy to forget as we go about our lives wearing these meat suits - the avatars our soul has chosen as the vehicle with which to navigate this human existence. It calls us back to our deeper calling, and reminds us that our soul came into this life with purpose, and that purpose may not be connected to what our mind or body wants to achieve. Those are the desires of the ego, that can often serve as distractions from the actual mission, if we can even remember the mission at all.
And that’s the thing we all forget but would be wise to remember - none of us are here by accident. We agreed to come here, to spend a lifetime in this body as a visitor to Earth, and we came here to do something specific. Our soul had a purpose coming into this realm, on a mission of expansion, to extend itself through the experience of separation from its own divinity - or at least the illusion of it. And before we each drank from the river of Forgetting, we did what any sensible soul would do before a long journey into amnesia and we wrote the mission down somewhere we’d always be able to find it.
We hid it in the sky.
I wrote in an earlier piece - What the Sky Remembers - about how the ancients believed the natal chart is a map of everything the soul chose before it came in, sealed into the heavens at the moment of first breath. Like all good maps, it has a compass, and that compass speaks directly to the nature of the soul that drew up the map - its South point tells us where the soul has been already and what it’s hoping to grow beyond in this life, and the North point indicates where the soul is headed, and what it’s here to aspire to in this life.
Those points, North and South, are the Nodes of the Moon, and when we read them against the rest of the chart, we can hope to remember exactly what we’re doing here, and why our soul came.
The Soul’s Nature in the Nodes of the Moon
The Nodes are not visible in the night sky - they’re not planets, or stars or asteroids. They’re geometric points marking where the Moon crosses the path of the Sun as she travels around the Earth; one where she crosses heading north, and one where she crosses heading south. Astrologers have watched these two crossing points for thousands of years, because they’re where eclipses happen - the places where the lights of the sky meet, and swallow each other, and return.
In a personal natal chart, these two points always sit exactly opposite one another, like the two ends of a compass needle laid across a map - the South Node pointing back along the road we’ve travelled to get here, and the North Node pointing toward the country that we came to explore.
So when the ancients said the chart is a memory of the life we each chose, this axis is the part of the memory that answers the biggest question of all - why did we choose it in the first place, and what exactly did we come here for?
The South Node: What Came With Us Through the Veil
On our way into this life, our soul goes through a process of forgetting - we agree to wear a veil of sorts, like a shroud that allows us to experience being human by hiding the fact that we’re infinite. That allows us to arrive in this body with a clean slate, with no memory of any past adventures in this realm or any other. But while we carry no memories in our physical mind, our soul brings all that in with it like luggage, and the South Node describes the shape of it, marking the territory our soul has walked across many lifetimes, a reflection of the soul’s knowing that lives deeper than our memory can reach.
In a person’s chart, the South Node describes the skill they’ve never had to learn and the role they slip into without thinking. It’s what’s inherent to that soul, and what they brought into this life from all the past journeys, describing their way of being that feels so natural to them that they assume everyone finds it easy, until they notice that they don’t, and that everyone else is looking at them as if they’re doing magic.
That’s the soul’s luggage - what was carried through the river. And for most people, what the South Node describes is something they’re good at but that no longer feeds them. It’s the thing people praise them for, that they could do with their eyes closed, that they keep returning to, over and over, even though it leaves them strangely empty every time.
The reason for that emptiness is that the South Node is finished territory - the soul has already harvested everything that ground can grow. When we return to it (and we always do because the pull backward is built into the design), we’re walking a road our soul has already walked to its end. It’s comfortable in its familiarity but there’s nothing left in it to find.
Our physical body doesn’t remember or really understand this, but the soul does because it chose this, and it wrote it into the map in the sky so that one day, standing in the middle of our own mastery and wondering why it feels hollow, we could look up and understand that this is where we’ve been but it isn’t where we’re going.
The North Node: The Reason We Booked this Trip
Always directly opposite the South Node sits the point our whole chart is leaning toward - the North Node, marking the appointment we made before we drank, and the specific quality our soul came into this body to explore and build, this time around.
Unlike the South Node, this is always territory that feels completely unfamiliar because our soul has had zero lifetimes of practice at navigating it. It’s the uncharted terrain on the map our soul chose specifically because it’s never been there, which is why where the North Node is pointing often makes a person wince, as the way feels so uncertain.
A person’s North Node often feels awkward, or exposed, or slightly wrong - a bit like wearing a coat that doesn’t fit yet, unless of course you’re already leaning well into your soul mission in this lifetime, in which case the coat may be starting to feel more comfy. People often meet their North Node and say “oh no….that’s the thing I’ve always been terrible at,” and that’s the best way to know it’s real. If it felt like home, we’d have done it lifetimes ago. The mission was never going to feel familiar - what would be the point of that? It was intentionally designed to feel like an edge.
The North Node is one of the kindest things the map can teach us. That low hum of restlessness so many of us carry - the sense that we’re supposed to be doing something we haven’t quite found yet - has a location with coordinates, and the discomfort we feel when we move toward it is simply the feeling of a soul doing precisely what it came here to do.
If you’ve ever felt that feeling, don’t assume you’re lost. You’re just travelling in the direction of North, as your soul always intended.
The Needle Points Both Ways
The Nodes act like a compass, with a North and South - two nodes in permanent opposition, so we can’t read one without the other. Where we’ve been and where we’re headed face each other across the chart, forever, in a tension that never fully resolves, and that tension is the engine of our whole life journey.
We will always pull back to the safe and familiar territory of the South Node. On the hard days, the tired days, and the days when the unfamiliar country feels like too much, we’ll reach for the old mastery the way a hand reaches for a banister. We all do it - many of us spend the greater part of our lives running back to the safety of the South Node; the comfortable territory that held us across lifetimes.
That’s not a flaw or a weakness - the South Node on our map is a gift, a foundation, the deep skill we get to bring with us into the new country. The intention was never to abandon it, but to live beyond it and let everywhere we’ve been become the thing that funds everywhere we’re going. The compass needs both ends of its needle, and so do we.
More often than not, the person who has spent their whole life being the capable one - the fixer, the strong shoulder, the one everybody leans on - discovers a South Node steeped in self-sufficiency and a North Node asking them, for the first time in their soul’s long story, to let themselves be held. When that person finds that in their chart, years of exhaustion suddenly make sense in a single breath.
The person who has always kept one foot out the door - brilliant at freedom, allergic to being tied down - meets a North Node calling them toward roots, toward staying, toward the terrifying vulnerability of belonging somewhere. And when they see it in a chart, suddenly the pattern of every relationship they’ve ever run from becomes legible as a soul practising the same old road, being gently asked to try the new one.
The person who has mastered the art of being sensible - the planner, the realist, the keeper of everyone’s feet on the ground - finds a North Node pointing straight into imagination, faith, and the unprovable, and finally understands why the “sensible” life keeps feeling like a room with no windows.
In each case the map says the same thing. The struggle was never a flaw, but the terrain the soul chose - the exact edge it came here to walk.
Battle Scars and Good Stories
McCrae ends his magnificent poem with the invitation to come back from this life with ”battle scars and good stories to tell.” The map in the sky shows each of us exactly where those stories are waiting. They’re at the North Node, in the unfamiliar country, past the edge of our mastery, in the territory our soul crossed a river of forgetting just for the chance to walk.
The South Node has no new stories left to give us. We’ve told them all, lifetimes over, but the reason we booked this trip is sitting on the far side of the chart, patient as the sky itself, waiting for us to point ourselves toward it.
Ready to Find Your Compass?
If any of this has landed as a deep knowing for you - if in reading this you’ve felt a suspicion about which old mastery has gone hollow and which unfamiliar country keeps calling - then your compass is ready to be read. When the time feels right, I’d be honoured to help you read it.
The nodal axis is one of the threads I unpack fully in the Astro-Blueprints I craft based on the map in the sky - a written report built around a natal chart, so that you can take your time reading the plans you hid in the stars, and come back to it again and again.
The Astro-Blueprint is a fifteen-page reading mapping your soul's purpose, your wiring for work and love and money, and where you currently stand within the life you came to live. Your nodes are read there in the context of your whole map, because the compass makes the most sense when you can see the terrain it's oriented across. If you’re wanting to understand your soul’s mission in this life, this is the perfect place to start.
Every reading is created personally, written for you alone, and delivered to your inbox. If you’re ready to explore where your soul has been and where it's going, here’s where to begin.
The compass is waiting in the sky.
When you’re ready to read it, I’ll be here.
If this writing resonated with you, please share it with your friends.
If you’re not ready for the full Blueprint, but interested in exploring your own natal chart, I was part of the team that built Ask Arion - an app that helps you read what the sky has to say for you personally.
It’s free to sign up, and a great way to start your journey with the stars.
I enjoyed hearing your voice speaking about this. My chart you did has helped me understand why I am here. This particular piece deepened my understanding of the Nodes. I get it now! South is the experiences we came here with, the familiar feelings and experiences we keep repeating for familiarity. The North is what we are here to create to deepen the soul’s connection to who we really are, without our masks, the veil.
Awesome piece, and the one about what the sky tells us about our purpose here was also helpful. Everything you write is helpful!!!!