Living Neptune 1st

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Tara Aal, co-author of the new Astrology by Moonlight.

This blog came to me when I was working on other things. It wasn’t my intention to write a blog today. It nudged and then pushed on me to come out. It has been my intention to spend less time trying to do my own thing with my own effort and more time doing my part in concert with everything. So the inner prompting to write this piece now is especially meaningful to me. Even more so because I had the time to do it. And that “time” just seemed to be here. I’m excited that the more I’m in the flow and working with energy, the more I find I have all the time I need. Time or the lack of it is just less of a factor. I still make appointments and set my alarm, but the meaningful things transcend it. I know it. And I’m starting to live it—living Neptune 1st.

Let me back up and give some context to “living Neptune 1st.” To deepen my practice of astrology and self-understanding, I have a tradition. Every year on my birthday, I choose a planet to experiment with and experience as the main character in my life story. I’ve been doing this since 2015 and now it’s 2021. My birthday is in July, so I’m just a couple of months into my new planet. This year, it’s Neptune. This Living Planets 1st is a choice to see and perceive life and “reality” through a particular facet of yourself. If I were a camera, I’d be changing the lens every year and then sticking with it long enough to get a good feel of it. Seeing everything through a fish-eye is way different than a macro lens. And a fish-eye lens is a pretty good way to describe Neptune. It distorts, stretches, bends, and shows an ultra-wide field of view. It’s like seeing a whole world in one peek.

Living Neptune 1st is an invitation not to narrow the view. Not to fix or edit something you don’t like. Everything belongs, just as it is. Sometimes we don’t want to see what’s right here. Especially if it’s angry, ugly, unsettling, super sad, or just incredibly uncomfortable. We don’t want that stuff in the picture. We want an image that looks the way we want to feel. So, whenever we don’t like the feeling, our solution is to change the picture. If we can’t physically change it, we can pretend to see something not there—or pretend not to see what is there. All this picture-making is like living in a fantasy world. And that’s where most of us live. I’m no exception, of course, and I’m very aware of how much more I can “let it be.”

We usually talk about Neptune as unity, spirituality, imagination, compassion, acceptance, mystery, and the collective energy field. It certainly is, but I want to see what else it has to show me. I find myself wanting new words to describe it, but words, in general, will not do this justice. So I’ll try anyway, and it might sound weird. I have a friend who sometimes responds to things by naming a color. Like, he’d say “the color is red” about the energy or feeling of an evening or interaction. Giving something a color, shape, or symbol tunes us in without being too descriptive. It leaves room. I’m going in that direction with this.

In my Neptune space, I’m dialed in and expanding out at the same time. The back of my head is activated, and I’m very aware of my energy field extending behind me. It’s like there’s something of me or part of me I haven’t really felt or seen before. I don’t know that I can ever “see” it, but I can sense myself “back there.” The color changes (maybe I can’t see it clearly) and it always shimmers—like dragonfly wings. I think of the song A Whiter Shade of Pale by Annie Lennox when she sings, “And the room was humming harder, as the ceiling flew away.” More truth is coming through, obliterating façades and obstructions in space and time.

Everyday things like my commute to work, a chat with a coworker, the neighbor’s dog barking, or taking out the trash seem oddly clear and surreal at the same time. Like they’re all movie scenes that I can watch or not. And I’m pretty convinced they disappear when I have no attachment to them. My attachment is the only “thing” keeping all the “things” alive. Neptune in me helps me see how I make a thing about things which creates more things. When I don’t need them, with the magic we attribute to Neptune, they’re gone.

More than anything, things are washing away. And that’s a relief because I’m tired of keeping them going. I needed them to be here and for them to feel real for a long time. Now, in the face of bigger, deeper experiences, they seem so small, unimportant, and silly. I’m emptying myself out. I need space for what counts.

Our thanks to Tara for this guest post! For more from Tara Aal, read her article “Use Your Moon Phase to Meet Your Moment .”