Neptune's the One to Watch (If Only We Could See Him)

5.12.06


The 'astrobarry Presents' Foundation (aPF) is pleased to announce the honor of the upcoming week's Planetary Player to Watch goes to…

…Neptune, for its outstanding level of engagement with all three personal planets (Mercury, Venus and Mars), as well as the fact of its slow-down-to-near-stand-still, in advance of its soon-to-be-turning retrograde (Mon May 22).

The award will be presented in a form indiscernible by your naked eye… an ethereal befuddlement that's also quite euphoric, should you decide not to pit your personal ignorance (we've all got it) against the larger divine wisdom… in a futile attempt to contain the unfolding events according to your plans.

You can't even determine, with any certainty, whether these events indeed are unfolding according to plan. For now, letting go must run the show.

The week kicks off on Monday (May 15) with Mercury in Taurus, squaring off against Neptune. Mr. Practical-Minded Pragmatist can't get one stray nut or bolt, fact or figure, to fit squarely into the proper sequence. And it's drivin' him batty. Maybe, in fact, he's got all the details he needs… though still he feels he's missing something. Or maybe those tiny invisible gremlins, the ones who continually paint and repaint every feature in the world so we have something to see, have purposely, mischievously excluded the absent piece… just to make him feel crazy. Their trick just might work.

Neptune then enters into an awkward inconjunct with Mars in Cancer, throwing our inner bloodhound off the true intuitive scent, with a red herring or two to fool the gut. Unfortunately, when it comes to internal experiences, fear trumps intuition every time. If we cannot trust the provident universe to lead us, along one route or another, toward its pearly treasures, we get frozen in fear-filled anticipation of our next stop on the tour. And thus, we can't know what to expect—because we're too busy being afraid of the worst-case scenario, which, in the cockamamied logic of some, is actually the best possible case.

And finally, it's Venus in Aries's turn… though her interlude with Neptune, a gently pleasant sextile, is hardly as perplexing. This combo reminds us: If you want to hang with the hot list and jump along into its last-minute, high-octane exploits, you have no choice but to release the need to know what's next. The best impulsives keep themselves from stumbling into ditches or hitting brick walls by keeping the faith, while keeping on their toes. For the daredevil romantics, it's a winning mix. For the rest, it can be disorienting.

Neptune's station to retrogradation is gentle and unassuming enough, like everything Neptune-related. Since this far-out planet moves backwards more than a third of the year, there's no big news here. But for the sensitive types, a faint change in breeze over the next week or so can offer clues as to where you've strayed from your higher purpose.

If you buy into Neptune's spiritual scriptures, you'll believe that we're all here to serve each other, as teachers and students simultaneously. My behavior affects your condition, and vice versa, through intangible ripples of interconnectedness that flutter our psychic fields.

If our recent attitudes haven't acknowledged this wider responsibility to each other, those ripples will hit us just so… to add an awareness, through funny feelings or vague notions, that something needs to shift. We want to boost the union, rather than selfishly yank away—unconsciously pulling the rest of society with us, a smidgeon at a time.