Standing at the Edge of What Was: The Completion of a 9-Year Cycle and My Own Personal Story

There comes a moment in life when everything grows quiet. Not because nothing is happening—but because something deep within us has finished unfolding. This is the energy of standing at the edge of what was. A pause between worlds. A breath between endings and beginnings.

Today, the closing of a nine-year cycle doesn’t arrive with fireworks. It comes softly. Gently. Sometimes with exhaustion, sometimes with clarity, often with both. It carries the weight of everything we’ve lived through, and the strange peace of knowing we no longer have to take it forward.

Over the past nine years, many of us have lived through profound change—not just externally, but internally. We have shed identities, outgrown relationships, questioned our beliefs, and learned to stand in our own truth, even when it felt uncomfortable or lonely. This cycle asked us to mature. To heal. To look at ourselves honestly.

As this chapter closes, we find ourselves standing at the edge of what was, looking back with wisdom, not regret.

The Meaning of a Nine-Year Cycle

In numerology, the number nine represents completion, integration, and release. It is the final step before the cycle begins again at one. Where one is birth, nine is culmination.

A nine-year cycle is not about beginnings—it is about understanding what has already happened.

It is the phase of:

• Closure and release.
• Spiritual maturity.
• Letting go of outdated versions of self.
• Integrating lessons rather than seeking new ones.
• Preparing the soul for a new direction.

These years often feel heavy, emotional, and profoundly transformative. Many people experience endings during a nine-year cycle—relationships dissolve, careers shift, belief systems change, and identities evolve. Not because something went wrong, but because growth requires movement.

This cycle asks us to ask hard questions:

• Who am I now, after everything I’ve lived through?
• What am I still holding onto out of habit or fear?
• What am I finally ready to release?

Most importantly:

Which version of myself is no longer meant to continue?

The Planetary Forces Behind This Cycle

This nine-year chapter has been compelling because it was not shaped by numerology alone—it was shaped by some of the most transformative planetary movements of our lifetime.

Saturn: The Teacher of Karma and Responsibility

Saturn has played a significant role in this cycle, especially for those who experienced:

• A Saturn Return.
• Major career or identity shifts.
• Profound lessons around boundaries, discipline, and self-worth.

Saturn strips away illusion. It shows us where we’ve been avoiding responsibility—and where we’ve been carrying too much. Over the past nine years, Saturn has demanded maturity, emotional accountability, and long-term growth.

Many of us were forced to grow up in ways we didn’t expect.

Pluto: The Great Transformer

Pluto’s long journey through Capricorn and now into Aquarius has reshaped entire generations. Pluto doesn’t gently nudge—it dismantles.

It has exposed:

• Power dynamics.
• Toxic structures.
• Control patterns.
• Deep ancestral and generational wounds.

This influence brought intense endings, but also profound rebirth. What couldn’t survive truth was meant to fall away.

Jupiter: Expansion Through Experience

Jupiter’s movement through multiple signs over this cycle expanded our emotional and spiritual awareness. It taught us through experience—not theory.

We learned:

• What freedom really means.
• Where our beliefs needed to evolve.
• How to trust our intuition more deeply.

Jupiter brought growth, but often through discomfort first.

The Lunar Nodes: Karmic Lessons

The shifting North and South Nodes during this period highlighted karmic themes—especially around relationships, purpose, and emotional maturity.

Many people felt pulled away from their old lives, identities, and attachments. This wasn’t random. It was karmic closure.

The Zodiac Signs Most Affected

While everyone felt this cycle in some way, sure signs carried their weight more intensely.

Capricorn & Cancer

These signs were deeply impacted by Pluto and Saturn.

Themes included:

• Family and ancestry.
• Career restructuring.
• Emotional boundaries.
• Rewriting personal definitions of success.

Aries & Libra

These signs experienced primary shifts in identity and relationships.

Lessons centered around:

• Self vs. partnership.
• Independence.
• Learning when to stay and when to walk away.

Scorpio & Taurus

These signs were asked to release control and embrace transformation.

Themes included:

• Trust.
• Stability vs. change.
• Emotional vulnerability.

Pisces & Virgo

These signs felt the spiritual weight of the cycle.

Many experienced:

• Emotional purging.
• Healing of old wounds.
• A stronger connection to intuition and purpose.

If you felt like the past nine years changed you fundamentally, you’re not imagining it. They were meant to.

 The Closing of My Chapters: My Personal Story

There comes a moment in life when everything grows quiet. Not because nothing is happening—but because something deep within us has finished unfolding. This is where I find myself now. Standing at the edge of what was.

The closing of this nine-year cycle has not come gently. It arrived layered, emotional, and profoundly transformative. And as a Pisces—a soul who feels everything, carries deeply, and often loves beyond measure—this chapter shaped me in ways I am only now able to understand fully.

I did not move through this cycle quickly. I drove through it slowly. Through darkness. Through healing. Through long seasons of learning how to sit with myself, to listen, and to grow without losing my softness. Now, for the first time in a long while, I am standing here with clarity. Not with anger. Not with regret. But with gratitude.

As a Pisces, I have always experienced life deeply. I feel things in layers. I carry emotion in my body. I love wholeheartedly, sometimes to my own detriment. And for a long time, I believed that loving sincerely meant enduring quietly.

This cycle taught me otherwise. It showed me how often I gave pieces of myself away trying to hold things together. Usually, I stayed too long, hoping things would change. How easily I absorbed the pain of others without tending to my own. There were years in this cycle where I felt lost. Years where I questioned my worth. Years where I wondered if the light I once carried had faded for good. What I see now is that I was never lost. I was becoming.

Alongside this nine-year chapter, I was also moving through a much longer transformation—a fifteen-year cycle that reshaped me at the deepest level. This was not surface growth. This was soul work.

For fifteen years, I walked through emotional darkness that taught me patience, resilience, and self-awareness. It was a season of unraveling old patterns, healing wounds I didn’t yet have words for, and learning to sit with discomfort rather than run from it.

There were moments when the darkness felt endless. Moments when I wondered if I would ever feel light again. But darkness, I’ve learned, is not always destruction. Sometimes it is incubation. Sometimes it is where strength is built quietly. Sometimes it is where we remember who we are when everything familiar falls away.

This is why I wrote Each Season of Our Life. This book is not just poetry. It is closure. It is healing. It is a reflection of every season I lived through—from innocence to heartbreak, from loss to awakening, from survival to becoming. This book is a dedication to all the girls I was with each season of my life. Each section holds a piece of our journey. Each poem is a step toward release. Each page is a goodbye to a version of who we no longer need to be. 

This book is the closing of a chapter I carried for many years. It is not written from anger or sorrow, but from understanding. It honors the past while letting it go, and it exists in the hope of guiding others toward forgiveness, healing, and peace.

Closing Reflections

Standing at the edge of what was is not about grief—it is about gratitude. Gratitude for the lessons that carved wisdom into your bones. Gratitude for the chapters that taught you who you are not. Gratitude for the strength you discovered along the way.

You do not need to carry the past forward to honor it. You only need to acknowledge it. This is the sacred pause before becoming. The quiet breath before the next beginning. The place where you release what no longer belongs to you—and step forward lighter than before.

You are not ending something. You are completing it. And that is its own kind of magic.

By Candlelight,

HN Staples

“Now we arrive here. At the edge of what was. At the closing of a chapter that shaped us profoundly. At the quiet moment before something new begins. This is not a time for rushing forward. This is a time to honor the version of you who survived—honoring the lessons that reshaped you—celebrating the strength it took to keep going when things felt uncertain. You may feel tired. You may feel reflective. You may feel oddly peaceful. That is the energy of completion." —HN Staples