This month New Moon was less than one degree away from a conjunction with my natal Neptune and boy have I felt it! I’m the kind of person who will cheerfully set three alarm clocks if I have to be up at a certain time, even though I have never slept through an alarm in my life. I will set up reminders on my phone and google calender of errands that need doing. I will write lists that I shift through my diary day by day, carefully highlighting in red what has been done. I write down exactly what I do everyday, hour by hour and sometimes compulsively moment by moment logging everything from past surfacing memories, to what I just ate to things I want to do in my life, novel ideas, song lyrics, feelings I’m experiencing andwords said by another than I want to remember. The endless babble of mind chatter. Passing moments that go to make a life.
My whole life I have been prone to periods of depression and severe anxiety - perhaps a manifestation of my natal Saturn conjunct Venus or my Sun square Moon. My early life was a mixture of confusion and disillusion (Neptune in the 4th) and a longing for some thing else, something more, something magical. I didn’t know back then that the magic was on the inside. My copious reems of writing everyday (my ‘life log’) is a residue of many years of memories lost as my minds eye was turned inwards staring quietly at itself: as though sometimes my mind could not comprehend at all who I was or how I had got here.
But these lost years of forgetting have given me a wonderful gift in that now I record everything I can – the books I read, the movies I watch, the inspirational quote, the albums I listened to and new music discovered. Whilst my conscious mind refuses to retain details (Mercury in Aries in the 9th house), these days it concedes to retaining the information long enough to make it to my diary. These days I can flip a page and there is my life; there is the past that I lived, the experiences I had, the gratitude I felt. These were the tears that fell and the moments of love that moved me. They are all here, all my memories and my dreams. They sit side by side, two different worlds seperated only by colour. Strangley, I can remember dreams from way back when…and though I might still forget your name, I will most likely remember the dream you told me in passing once when you met me five years ago.
Ah Neptune…
So I have learned to remember and taught myself methods of living in the waking world with bills to pay and deadlines to meet, so when the new Moon conjuncts Neptune what happens?
The world seems to have filled up with a soft glow. It’s not romance but there is great love in my heart that penetrates my very soul. It isn’t the mist of tears. It’s like seeing life through a soft veil. I find myself forgetting day to day things that I never forget. Like leaving my phone charger somewhere when my battery is almost flat, forgetting to put my earrings on, forgetting to buy conditioner for my hair. In the meantime my intuition which granted is pretty strong, has taken a leap with people popping into my mind, psychic flashes and vivid dreams. In one dream I saw my Mother (who has passed on) much like a horror film demon complete with white eyes, scarred grey skin and blood dripping. I associate the Mother with the 4th house. The dream spooked me so much I became lucid within it. The ‘horror’ had just become so overdone the fear subsided into laughter and my demon Mother no longer had a hold on me. I simply told myself to wake up and with a metaphorical clicking of heels, I awoke.
The scene dissolved, as we dissolve into laughter when the worst is over and we realise how stupid we have been, how silly. And how strong we can feel, how light, buoyed on giggles, racing towards cloud nine.
When the New Moon conjuncts a natal planet it brings the natal planet potentialities into focus. My natal Neptune is part of a perfect yod with Uranus and Mercury (the apex). No wonder then that I find my mind overwhelmed with images, old memories suddenly returning. Someone today talked about sandwich spread – something I haven’t eaten since I was about 6 years old and suddenly I am there with my packed lunch, peeling the white lid back. The smell of plastic lingers on the bread, the corner of my sandwich is slightly soaked in leaked orange juice. Beside me is a girl who has loads of cool stickers on her lunch box and I want to be like her. She’s cool and I’m just a little weird. They say I talk to animals and I do because I don’t quite know how to talk to people. Trees talk too but I don’t tell them that. I know I’m a little strange from an early age but I like being lost in my music and my books and in writing. I have no need to come up for air because I seem to breath better in the sea of the unconscious. When I go horse-riding, the best moments are when I can sneak a few paces away from all the others and it’s just me and my black beauty and I can forget that he isn’t mine and never will be.
Illusion, imagination, dissolving – the action of transcendence, spirituality. I see things when I am a child and I learn not to speak of them. I learn also not to mention the drunkeness of my father or the terror I felt when I smelt alcohol on his breath.
Neptune: with his strange gifts, sweet and illusive, compassionate, magical. Always magical.
So in my odd forgetting over the past couple of days I feel a different kind of memory. A deeper memory reminding me that I am still that child who once was; however damaged, however lost. I always was one to write and to make up stories. The one who lived in fantasy worlds filled with pink skies, good kings and horses upon horses. Where music was made by singing crystals and the end of the universe was impossible to imagine.
This is my Neptune and instead of feeling confused about him, I can suddenly accept him. I can even forgive him for what he has shown me in the past. Perhaps it is just about forgiving myself too for those times when madness descends. Sometimes it’s easy to blame yourself for the past you feel you should have had, or the child you should have been. I sometimes forget that I was just a child.
So tonight as I write these somewhat unexpected words, I embrace my glorious Neptune, wrap my arms around him and give him a big soggy hug. Thank you Neptune for your nebulous world, for dreams and for the music, for wild unbridled imagination, for soul love. Thank you for the horses and the whispers from the other side. Thank you for poetry and Clive Barker and Buffy the Vampire Slayer! Thank you for the part of me that is done with forgetting and now seeks to remember and reintegrate without regret.
