I was twenty-five in 1994 when I started hearing it. Buy a house. I had no interest in buying a house. I was three years into life in Melbourne, sharing a place with Paul and Pam, who had become close friends. We went out together. We laughed a lot. Renting suited me.
I had recently made a deliberately strange move at work. A few years into my role as a chemical engineer, I had asked to step sideways into a job as a plant operator — from suit to overalls, white collar to blue, the first female operator the plant had ever had. Most people told me it was a stupid idea. I trusted the inner pull anyway. That story belongs to another telling. What matters here is that I was already in the practice of choosing the path that didn’t make obvious sense, when something inside me said this one.
So when buy a house arrived, I noticed it. I just didn’t act on it.
For months I let it sit. Then, slowly, the share house began to come apart – over toothpaste, of all things. Pam and I moved out together to another place. That one came apart too, in ways I can no longer quite reconstruct. By the middle of the year I had nowhere to live. My friend Anthea and her mother took me in.
Anthea and I had met a few years earlier in a way I still find funny. I had just finished a Reiki course and was sitting at home, doing Reiki on myself and turning over what I had learned. Earlier that day, in class, someone had asked the teacher how a healer gets clients. They will come knocking, she had said. I was remembering this when there was a knock at the door.
I laughed to myself. Oh — here is my first client.
It was Anthea, looking for her mother, who knew someone in my house. She and I started talking, and we never really stopped. There are eleven years between us. We had babies within a couple of years of each other. Our daughters are best friends now, both in their mid-twenties.
She took me in. I sat down on her floor with a Melways, the big book of Melbourne street maps that lived in every car at the time. I found the suburb we were in. I found the area around Anthea’s house. I drew a square around a few streets in pen.
Then I spoke out loud, into the empty room.
Fine. If you want me to buy a house, find me one in here.
I have a stellium of planets in Aries. I have a tendency to be impetuous. I wasn’t praying. I was daring. I had no idea I had just given the universe its instructions.
I started looking for a house with Anthea.
The numbers were uncomfortable. I had about ten thousand dollars saved. Houses in the area were going for a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. So while I was looking at houses, I was also visiting banks.
The first one was the bank I had been with since school. The one that should have been on my side. I sat down across from a man in a tie and answered his questions. After a few minutes, he asked me whether I had a partner — meaning, whether I had a man to put on the mortgage with me.
My eyes opened wide.
I took a breath and asked him directly. Was my salary capable of servicing the loan on its own? He said yes, definitely. They would just be more comfortable if a man was on the paperwork.
I didn’t go to that bank.
I tried the others. None of them were as blatant as the first. None of them were any more useful. In the end, I got the loan through Aussie Home Loans, a mortgage broker who was happy to lend to a woman with a good salary and a small deposit.
Because the deposit was small, I had to apply for mortgage insurance. I filled in the form, sent it off, and a short while later it came back approved. I noted the approval and moved on with my life.
What I didn’t know — and didn’t learn until much later — was that my application had landed on the desk of a man who happened to be the boss of my ex-boyfriend Bernard’s current girlfriend. We were all friends. One day, in the office, she heard her boss laughing. She looked over and asked what was funny. He pointed at the application on his desk with my name on it. He was in a good mood, he told her. He was going to approve it.
She told me that story months later. I laughed.
I had been making my moves. Visiting banks. Filling in forms. Trying to prove to the universe that this would be impossible for me.
The universe had been three moves ahead the whole time, having a quiet laugh at a desk I would never see.
I started going to open inspections.
One Saturday I walked into a house and got about halfway down the hall before I realised it was well out of my price range. I turned around to leave. The agent was at the far end of the hall, in the kitchen, talking to a couple who were clearly serious buyers.
I had taken about three steps toward the door when I heard her behind me.
She had left the couple mid-sentence. She came down the hall after me, didn’t ask whether I was interested in the house I was standing in, and told me that a property had just been listed that morning. No advertisement yet. Nothing online. She thought I would be interested. She handed me her card and told me the address. I wrote it on the back as she spoke.
105 Hobson Street.
Then she went back to the couple in the kitchen.
I have thought about that moment many times since. There was no reason for her to leave a sale to chase a young woman walking out of a house she couldn’t afford. Something moved her. I was beginning to recognise the feeling of being moved, even when I couldn’t see who was doing the moving.
I arranged a private inspection. There were no open houses for it yet. I walked through the front door. A small Buddha statue sat on the floor beside the fireplace, looking up at me as I came in. The lounge room walls were painted pink. I would later paint them out, but in that moment, the pink delighted me. I walked through the rooms and felt nothing dramatic — no vision, no voice. Just a quiet, settled recognition, the kind you feel when you arrive somewhere you didn’t know you had been heading toward.
In the back garden, I noticed something written on the fence in faded paint. A name. Bernard. The name of my ex-boyfriend. Seeing it on the fence felt like a small wave from someone I knew, in a place I had never been before. I noted it and moved on.
The house had only just gone on the market and the sellers had not yet decided what they were expecting. I made one offer — the maximum the loan would allow — and waited.
They took it.
There was no back and forth. No counter. No second round. One offer, accepted.
A few months later, while I was still waiting for settlement, I got a phone call from Chris Harvey, my old shift team leader. He had recently left the chemical plant to retrain as an outdoor recreation instructor. His final assessment involved leading a group through hiking, rock-climbing, abseiling, and sailing in the Whitsundays. He was ringing to invite me along.
My first thought was I can’t. I had just bought a house. The settlement money was sitting tight. There was no spare few thousand dollars for a trip. And as the newest shift worker on the plant, my annual leave had been the last pick of the year — I had taken whatever dates were left over.
I asked Chris when the trip was, expecting the dates would clash with my leave and I would be off the hook. The dates he gave me were the exact dates of my leave.
I felt the small panic of the universe being too clever. I knew that kind of coincidence. I had seen it work in my own life often enough by then to understand what was being asked of me. But the money was real. The house was real. The settlement was real.
Half exasperated, half daring, I said to spirit: Fine. You want me to buy a house and go on this trip? You will need to make the money happen. The house settles a week after I get back. I need the full deposit ready when I return.
Out loud, I said yes to Chris.
The trip itself belongs to other pieces. It was the trip where I would later see two orbs become an O and an S on a red rock wall — that story already told. It was also where I had a vision of being burned on a pyre, and where I met my husband. Both of those will come in their own time.
What matters here is what happened with the money. I came home, opened my bank statement, and looked at the balance. It was the same as the day I had left.
I had spent a few thousand dollars on flights, food, equipment, accommodation, fuel for the long drive back from Queensland. None of it had come out of where I expected it to come out of. I cannot tell you the mechanism. I can only tell you what I saw in front of me on the page.
The house settled a week later. I had exactly what I needed.
A few months after I moved in, I locked myself out of the house. I stood on the front step looking at the door and ran through my options. None of them were good. I had the phone number of the couple I had bought the house from, a retired couple who had, I think, taken a kindly view of me when we first met, the young woman starting out on her own. I rang them. I asked the woman if there was a way to get into the house without too much damage. Or, by any chance, did they still have a spare key.
She didn’t know, but maybe her husband could help. In the meantime, they were only a few suburbs away. Why didn’t I come over for a coffee while we waited for her husband to come home?
I drove over straight away. I sat at her kitchen table, and she made me a cup of coffee. We talked about small things at first. Then, somewhere in the conversation, she told me she was a medium. She said her guides had told her, when the house went on the market, that she had to sell it to me. They had told her she would need to accept less than the house was worth, and that the shortfall would be made up to her in other ways. She told me the real estate agent had estimated the gap at around twenty thousand dollars.
I sat across from her at the kitchen table and listened.
I had been moved. I had known that for a while. I had felt the agent run down the hall after me. I had heard, later, about the man laughing at his desk over my mortgage application. I had watched my bank balance hold steady through a trip I shouldn’t have been able to afford.
But I had thought I was the only one being moved.
I wasn’t.
Her husband came home. He couldn’t find the spare key, but he knew the house — he told me about a window that didn’t shut properly, and exactly how to climb in without breaking anything. I drove back to Hobson Street and let myself in through it. Everything inside was exactly as I had left it. But something in me had quietly rearranged.
When I looked back at the astrology of that year — much later, with the eyes I have now — two things stood out.
On the day 105 Hobson Street sold, the eleventh of August 1995, transiting Saturn was sitting in Pisces in my second house, the house of resources and what I can claim as my own. Saturn is the slow teacher who works through pressure and time, the one who does not act dramatically but builds, gradually, a structure that holds. He was sitting opposite transiting Pluto, less than a degree away from exact. Saturn-Pluto oppositions don’t ask. They restructure. They dismantle what cannot stay so that something more durable can be built in its place.
That was the architecture underneath the whole year. The shared houses that came apart. The bank that turned me away. The young woman walking out into the world to discover what was actually hers. I wasn’t being unlucky. I was being apprenticed.
And on the same day, the transiting IC — the deepest point of the sky in any given moment, the cosmic point of home — sat at 11.29 Aquarius, almost exactly conjunct my Ascendant at 11.34 Aquarius.
The home point and the self point, meeting in the sky, on the day I bought my first house.
I did not know any of this at the time. I had basic astrological literacy. I was simply doing what I had been asked to do, signing the contract on a small house with a Buddha by the fireplace and a Bernard on the back fence.
The sky knew what I didn’t.
I lived at Hobson Street for almost six years. I married Sean. We had our first daughter. We talked about a second. The small house with the Buddha and the pink lounge began, slowly, to feel too small for what was arriving.
I wasn’t waiting for a nudge this time. I knew how it worked now. So when the dream came, I recognised it immediately.
I dreamed I had moved into a library.
A short while later, we found a house on Power Street. The woman selling it had been a librarian.
I didn’t need a Melways. I didn’t need a shared house to fall apart. I didn’t need a stranger to chase me down a hallway. I had been shown the house in a dream and met the librarian a few weeks later, and that was enough. We made one offer. She countered. We told her, plainly, that our original offer was the most we could do. She took it.
When I looked back at the day Power Street sold — the fifth of March 2001 — the same teacher was there, but his work had changed.
Transiting Saturn had moved to Taurus in my fourth house, the house of home itself. The teacher who had stood in the house of resources six years earlier, dismantling what could not stay, had moved closer to the actual subject. He was now opposite my natal Neptune at 28 Scorpio — the Neptune that forms one base of my Yod, the wider vision that quietly underwrites my chart. The aspect was wider this time. Three degrees instead of less than one. The lesson was gentler. I no longer needed to be dismantled to learn it.
And Pluto, who had once stood opposite Saturn doing the heavy work, was now sitting opposite my natal Lilith.
Lilith is the part of the soul that lives outside every system that tries to contain her. The figure who will not lie down to be liked, who holds her truth even when it costs her, who keeps going. Pluto opposing her is the deep excavation of that figure into visibility.
Power Street has been the house I have done my adult work in. It is where I came into my own. It is where I am writing this, and every other piece in this series, from a small room I claimed for myself many years ago.
Hobson Street was the apprenticeship. Power Street was what got built.
The home that Pluto and Lilith asked me to build was the home I could finally write from.
The next piece is about a door that opened in Canterbury, a man who said four words I had already heard in a vision, and the dare that decided everything.
The patterns I write about here can be read in your own chart too. If you’d like to explore your soul map, I offer galactic astrology readings at divinehealingx.com — including an Asteroid Deep Dive that explores the soul-level threads traditional astrology often misses.
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