When I was a kid my brothers and I used to do this thing where we would stand in a door frame and press the backs of your arms and hands as hard as we could against the frame, counting to 60, to get a full minute in. Then, once you had exerted all your will to press as hard as you could for that sustained amount of time, which seemed a forever, you stepped out of the frame and marveled at what happened to your arms. They seemed to float freely away from the body, finally following through on what you were training them to do in that brief span of a minute. This week, the planet Neptune moves from the door frame described as tropical Pisces into Aries, across the vernal point out of the water and into the fire. The question is, will our arms rise up to meet it?
Neptune has been moving through Pisces for the last 14 years. The last time Neptune moved from Pisces into Aries was 163 years ago, in 1862. Relatively speaking, this was not long after the planet was discovered, and it coincided with a significant time of moving beyond what had been framed to test the strength of its boundaries. Everest was named the tallest peak in the world, the American Civil War erupted, and eventually, Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published, each one of these testing a boundary: of the known world; of brotherhood; of the human being’s spiritual nature.
But history doesn’t need to repeat itself. Perhaps the movement of Neptune now can signal a time for finding ground right where we are, of celebrating loving, human relationship, and of developing a sense for the helping, streaming forces at work in the world. There’s a fair amount of play and fantasy when Neptune is afoot, and the only way to know if any of this is so, is to take your own life as the research project and watch for the clues.
We can’t see Neptune with the naked eye, but this week we can watch for the Moon, moving up the sky past Pleiades on Tuesday, Jupiter on Wednesday, through the horns of the Bull to pass by Mars and the immortal twin Pollux on Saturday, as if to ask: What endures, o human being?
With Neptune moving into Aries and our arms raised up to meet what is to come, this is the quest ~ for us to take hold of that which endures.
Let these words of the poet Rilke be an inspiration for this time:
I feel it now, there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to the world. I know nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things, and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
All the best!
Mary
Hear this week’s episode of The Storyteller’s Night Sky on podcast here and wherever you listen. The stunning cover image was taken in 1989 by Voyager II.