The first time I tried to write this blog it disappeared. Typical Neptune. I had been writing it within another document and although the other piece remained, Neptune just vanished. Similar experiences have happened with Neptune involved: a married client talks about her ghost lover during a session, and my recording device on my computer times out leaving us with no evidence of the discussion. Neptune absconds with time, too, as if to prove that actions mark time, and that without actions time is made irrelevant; many Neptune transits leave the person experiencing them with a Neptune-induced amnesia — people forget what they did for days, weeks and even years. Books are started and half-finished, romances appear then disappear, houses are swept away by floods… There must be a special place in heaven for those still left wondering, “Whaaatt?” by their Neptune transit. A “Neptune” Lost and Found, a place where people can go and be reunited with lost objects, people, ideas, lives. I hope so.
The Neptune Square is a generational transit. It happens for all of us between the ages 40-42, for approximately a 2 year passage. The Neptune Square introduces itself with a general malaise and fatigue, dis-enchantment if you will, with how things have panned out so far. The timing of this makes sense. Your thirties are a busy time spent striving to make goals and livelihoods happen. Most of us are building a career, relationship and family and all of this takes so much energy, energy we can senselessly spend, and often without stopping to pause or self-introspection, because we do have the energy and determination to forge ahead.
The Neptune square marks a crisis in consciousness. The plans we’d previously made, ideas, ambitions that may have been designed years ago, are faltering. We are at a crossroads, and an area of our life – our career, marriage, health, finances, creativity- feels at sea, adrift. We may feel, in mounting sea-waves of anxiety, that our life may no longer actually fit the person we’re walking around being, and yet who are we? The person we are today is a moving target, at best. I love how Steven Forrest captures this intangible existential experience of self-hood when he says (to the AP class), “I am doing a really good impression of being Steven Forrest today, aren’t I?” Yes, we think, I am here, but who is the I? This self-construction may actually just be good theatre, a dramatic creation. We may feel like we are actors in our own life, like everything has both become too real and yet nothing is real. With Neptune, Nothing is as it seems. The reference point for the “I” is changing, but it’s happening underwater so there’s no perspective on what’s truly happening. There is a sense of being in a bubble or aquarium, being removed from life.
I’ve just begun my Neptune Square. My energy and interest, it sort of floats. The tether to daily reality can feel thin, and when it does its easy to get sidetracked. Projects go on hold. Sleeping and dreaming have taken on enormous importance. Routines, like sticking to a daily schedule, feel too rigid, and goals that I’m not able to be utterly absorbed by and lose myself in completely, feel somehow contrived and false. But then again, even if I’m absorbed in a project or aspiration, the next day may find me feeling empty and uninspired, unable to show up in totality. Enthusiasms and passions come on strong, and then leave mysteriously, without a trace. I am feeling the typical direction-less-ness and living with unknowns that accompanies this time, too. The only reliable anchor throughout is the present moment, and the present moment refuses to be pinned down to anything more than what is happening. As I re-read this paragraph, I know this is the kind of stuff that strikes fear in the hearts most of us. After all, we live in a society that is hellbent on productivity, that measures our worth and status by how much we earn, contribute and produce.
I’ve got a chronic illness, too, which is terrifying in its own right but because its occurring during my Neptune Square I’m wondering if I’ve lost the better part of my health forever. Neptune always creates heightened sense impressions and anxieties– like the Moon, but on steroids. I fear fading away, disappearing from society altogether, becoming one of society’s “invisible ones,” which Neptune also charges. Neptune rules my sixth house of health, so this fear is not entirely irrational, but it is tinged with the heightened emotionalism, loss and grief of Neptune.
In Neptune, astrologer Dana Gerhardt says: “I think of the countless thirty- and forty-somethings who in the middle of their Neptune square*, lost their dreams, their taste for life, their sense of who they are.” Dana also echoes something I feel: how flimsy it sounds to tell anyone experiencing a Neptune transit that this is a time for exploring spirituality and creativity. Or, if someone is in the middle of loss, trying on the idea that loss could be the revenge of a dishonored God? It doesn’t hold water. Contemplating Neptune, it doesn’t help that we astrologers have an arsenal of nightmarish Neptune stories, our own version of “why do bad things happen to good people?”.
So what is the purpose and value of the Neptune Square? Rob Hand says, “The function of this transit is to make you reevaluate who you are, which at the moment you do not know.” That about sums it up. I believe, in a roundabout way, we will eventually find that the Neptune Square wants to re-inspire and yet we don’t have the map for getting there.
With Neptune around, we ask these questions: is our Soul inspired? Do we need healing? Do we need ecstasy? We know that when Neptune comes around it is a time to favor the experiential, mystical and impractical in life, and that Neptune cares little for how much time or how reasonable an activity is. A friend spent his entire Neptune Square listening to music and drinking, which only yielded a musical anthology – a sort of “your life in music” set of recordings. But, he recalls fondly, for the hundreds of hours spent with nothing much to show, he spent them in sheer bliss. He has natal Neptune conjunct Venus in his sixth house.
Do we need more relaxation, healing and bliss? Another friend, during her Neptune transit, after a period of feeling rudder-less and directionless, gravitated toward a spiritual manifestation practice. Using Martha Beck’s book, Finding Your Own North Star, she was instructed to write down ten dream activities if money (and salary) were no object. She was then instructed to take one easy action toward “Getting paid to have spa treatments,” one of hers. As one synchronicity led to another, before she knew it, spa owners of prestigious spas were contacting her with free treatments in exchange for a review of their services on her new spa review blog. She is a Virgo with Natal Neptune in the second house, North Node in Pisces.
I’m inspired by my friends’ stories. For both, the Neptune Square yielded blissful, positive experiences, and for both it required them to surrender, go down the rabbit hole and then see what kind of magic was waiting there. Yet even recounting their successes tempts my wiley Ego -who is already licking Her clever little chops, trying to design a way to make the Neptune Square work for Her. If we think we are running this show, impressionable, susceptible, elusive Neptune will create false hope and false starts; if we decide that our Neptune square is the perfect time to write that epic fantasy, play or romance novel, Neptune just may be tempted to erase it. Maybe we can make the Gods work for us, but only on their terms, and Neptune’s terms are notoriously hard to pin down.
To that end, Neptune, is the planet of consciousness and perhaps this is where we finally get the answers we seek. The answers we look for in books, from astrologers and psychics, often prove elusive. The fact of the matter is, we are not yet who we are to become. Just as the seed doesn’t know whether it will grow into a tree or a flower, we will probably not understand what our Neptune Square has delivered until our consciousness has flowered enough to contain that understanding. Till then, we can align our intention for vision with Neptune’s desire to enlighten us. Then wait and see.
Other astrologers thoughts on Neptune, from Jessica Adams blog on Neptune in Pisces:
LIZ GREENE – The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption
“The mythology of Neptune begins with the mythology of water. In astrological symbolism, Neptune is the ruler of Pisces, the third sign of the watery trigon; and the god after whom the planet is named is the lord of the ocean depths. But even if the planet had been called by another name, the language of water arises spontaneously on the lips of those experiencing important transits and progressions involving Neptune. Over and over again I have heard people completely unfamiliar with astrology describe their feelings and perceptions at such critical times with images such as drowning, flooding, drifting, dissolving, swamped, inundated and flowing with the current.”
CAROLINE W.CASEY – Making the Gods Work for You
“We know Neptune is at work (or play) in our lives, when we feel “at sea.” if we are relaxed, confusion and disorientation may be experienced as a sense of mystery, sent by Neptune to remind us that we are much larger than our current cirumstance or self-definition.”
DEBBI KEMPTON-SMITH – Secrets From a Stargazer’s Notebook
“Hang on to the idea that the sign and house of Neptune is where you’ll be happiest if you purify your life in some way. Clean up and enjoy the Jungian oceanic feelings.”
SUE TOMPKINS – Aspects in Astrology
Where Neptune is situated or what Neptune touches tends not to accept (possibly not even recognise) boundaries, it seems as if nothing will get in the way of the attainment of the wish, dream or desire.”
This post could not have been more perfectly timed. I’m 42, I left my entire life two and a half years ago to live in New Orleans and redefine myself. I’ve never been this lost, delirious, betwixt and between the veils, some days just lingering in the present moment for long stretches of time, and other days prolifically writing, dancing an devouring the creative atmosphere that I live in. In August I stopped earning an income. I was working a part-time job that was bleeding me. My 14 year old career as a massage therapist seems to be on hold at the moment. I’m a Taurus with moon and Venus in 12th house Pisces and Neptune in 8th house Sagitarius. Like Dorothy, I feel lost but I’m meeting such wonderful people along the way that it feels as though there is a divine purpose to all of it. I’m counting on it, and even though I often feel lost at sea, I know that this too shall pass. THANK YOU for writing this column.
Poseidon is laughing! That’s how it feels. The minute we narrow it down, the bubbles come up and perhaps we should just take a big bubble bath during this transit. I’ve been in the middle of it for 2 years and may have nothing to show for it when it’s over in January – but I’m gonna try a bit more before I take off to India and live in a hut. Oh, wait, I already did that. Damn! Skewered by the trident again! I like your friend’s idea of drinking and listening to music for 2 years. Now there’s an idea ;-). I myself feel overwhelmed and swamped, like you describe, and I am completely powerless over everything.
Dear Jessica, I wish you the very best with your sleeping and dreaming! When this transit is over, Neptune is gonna have to answer for something. Let us know what you find out.
You are a very lovely writer. Your prose style, and I guess content, set me at ease. I felt as if you were saying, “Namaste” to me.
New Orleans? Once I dreamed of living there. My relocated ascendant would be on my Neptune there. But then I learned that the destruction of Kathrina happened, because New Orleans is like many other coastal cities below sea level. That made my dream die. Now I’d rather try to avoid coastal cities.
Obviously it isn’t possible to put a comment here right below another comment. A disadvantage for any discussion…
By the way, transiting Neptune makes now a square with my Mercure and then with my Vesta.
This gave me the feeling: “oh! It’s not me! It’s Neptune!”… I’m only starting my Neptune square and I already feel everything you’ve written. I really do hope this will bring some kind of ¿enlightenment?, ¿creativity?… For the time being I’m just pretty lost, for no apparent reason. I have everything I ever wished for, I couldn’t be more grateful, yet, somehow I’m not as happy as I should be. Now I don’t know what to do with myself…
It is really helpful to know I’m not the only one!
Thank you!
This is exactly what I am going thru! I am 41 and Neptune is taking over my chart. Sense of floating, not knowing where I am going or where life is taking me, without meaning, needing lots of sleep and unable to accomplish anything – and I am fairly driven by OCD otherwise. Lol!
I am relinquishing my control and going to lay back and gaze at the stars until I feel this ship hit some solid land again.
God I sit here crying once again with my dog by my side. I have Neptune transiting my 6 th house conjunct my moon in Pisces squaring my natal Neptune in sag. Four kids on my own trying to work and cope but clearly not, needing support and understanding but can’t seem to get that from anyone or anything. I though Pluto squares were hard but this is consuming me to where I wish i could return home to the stars. so on point this article.
I’m 36 and don’t have Neptune square yet but what you’ve described above describes my life perfectly now. I have transit Neptune opposing my Mercury and it’s extremely difficult. Transit Neptune in the 7th, natal Mercury in the first. Whatever I’d start getting into gets sooner or later (more like sooner) dissolved, including my personality and belief system. Nothing is certain, everything is blurry, I can’t focus, my memory got bad, people misunderstand me often.
The only thing constant about me is watching spirituality related videos and reading similar stuff. Also astrology and my daily yoga practice. I’m grareful for Neptune to show me who I really am (or am not), but this whole journey is a huge challenge and often I’m wondering how long I can take it. And then just when I think of that, soon it all gets amazing again and something magical happens. But very small steps of magic…
I am going thru the Neptune square Neptune now. It is transiting my 6th and squares my 3th. My natal Neptune is at 17 degrees so it’s what now. It’s very hard at the moment. I feel it in my job, work is insecure, income halved. It started April 2019, or at least that is when i felt it. I am so done with this square. How long does it square? I hope when it moves on to 19 or 20 degrees the situation gets better. How long did you all felt the transit? Regards Juliette
You described the square perfectly. Yes it makes you feel lost, disinterested in real life. I need more inspiration to create the life I want. My natal Neptune is in Sagittarius 5th house and transiting is in 9th now. I took a pause to see what did I do in my life the last decade and I felt so disappointed. I m in my worst financially. A bit of luck wouldn’t hurt
Glad you resonated, Sofie, even if it isn’t what we want to hear! Disappointment, looking back at past regrets and roads not taken are common themes for this time. It can feel like a very long period of pea soup, this Neptune square time, but it will shift. Keep surrendering old ways of being and asking for new Vision. Grounding into the Present/the Now really helps. xx Jessica