Some Stories Astrology Tells About Love: Neptune
“MAY WHATEVER COVERS OUR HEARTS BE DISSOLVED” That’s a metta phrase from John Travis I learned years ago, it’s also my wish for what this writing series might contribute.
What I want to talk about is a circle/spiral in the evolution of love. Astrology might tell it as dance between Neptune and Venus. The impulse to love (Venus), with the impulse to be merged into one with the cosmos (Neptune). Neptune is our connection to the vast unseen. Usually artists and people who are drawn to spiritual pursuits have Neptune prominent in their charts. Neptune gives people the gift of dreaming. Imagining. Pulling the visions of nonform idyllic love toward Earth. There’s a level of pain that feels inherent to living on Earth for Neptune people. Because our awareness, whether conscious or not (often unconscious, since that is also the nature of Neptune) shows us what it all might be, could be. The dream of the most astonishing love. And then there is that whole being in a body thing. That whole personality thing. That whole karma thing. Karma as in the deeply embedded space-time ancestral, physical, cultural, psychological context of each being.
I want to give more names to the kinds of pain felt by Neptune people. The artists, the sensitives. Because for me, to name it is to free it, a little. The pains felt by Neptune’s pull include the experience of the gap between the vast visions of possibility and manifest temporal corporeal earth life. Neptune’s prominence in your chart, or presence in the form of a transit, gives you access to a range of desires you’re here to learn how to be with in your body while on Earth. The desire to transcend, the desire to merge into universality, the desire to escape being in a body, existing at all. The desire to engage perfect romantic love where no one disappoints another. The desire to be in unfiltered communion with god. Some of us don’t make it, as in we can’t live with these desires, it’s too much, the pain of the disconnection we often feel as part of the human experience is too much to manage and people cut out early. Those of us who do live with it must become grief composters, using all ingredients.
We find the ways to reconnect to god/love/nature often enough to survive. And we find the ways to practice faith that we will reconnect when we’re in disconnection. (That’s what faith is for.) We become familiar with the cycle we experience over and over: a dream, a vision, a fantasy, its overlay on a person, a career, a geographical location, a circumstance, a healing modality. Putting all our salvation into the thing. And then we are disillusioned. The person leaves. The career dissolves, the place gets gentrified. Over and over, we are provided opportunities to see through our delusions. We grieve. We vow to never do it again.
But to be located temporarily in a mind (aka incarnated) is to be subject to delusion. To have a mind, to have a subjectivity at all, is to be unable to have another subjectivity. Meaning delusion is part of the deal, it’s baked in! And this cycle is not wrong, it isn’t to be fixed.
We find ways to live with it, if we’re graced with conditions to do so. And we keep being vulnerable enough to be available to touch the vast god ocean, and filter what we can through the sponge of incarnation.
It’s oh so messy, heartbreaking and usually extremely confusing.
But without Neptune, without this tuning fork placed in us, we wouldn’t even feel the separation from god. And our sensitivity to the separation is a kind of salvation that can be offered, as painful as it is.
Our sensitivity to the separation is something to revere, to protect.
Our sensitivity to the separation is a path forward on a planet full of premature death. So we can lament Neptune’s place in our charts, because we likely will. The idealization-disillusionment cycle is a painful facet of earth life!
But we need it. We need windows to the unseen and unnamed, and the courage to keep looking through them. They show us how much bigger love can be.