Under the spell of another dream and drowsy from the hypnotic hum from the nearby fan I curl up with the blankets in the darkened bedroom.  Time is an illusion in the fog of the ether.  But the middle world (aka the Real World) beats its urgency through the limitless void, eventually waking me with concerns of bills, work and errands.  The dreamtime always seems to end too quickly.  Didn’t I just go to sleep a few hours ago?   But the middle world time tracker next to me shows the reality.  Time to Show Up!

But showing up does not always clear the fog of this astrological passage called a Neptune Square Neptune.  The dreamtime continues its permeation in my waking life, throwing me off at times when caffeine isn’t surging through my veins.  The simple things become complex and memory is a window into times, dates and experiences that bleed into one another without respect to our linear “cause & affect” world.  Mid-Life is here and in astrological terms, it is a time to re-orient oneself to our soul’s original intent.

Part of the fun of western culture’s defining, “mid-life crisis,” is experiencing this astrological transit called a Neptune Square Neptune.  This is a cycle that gives a person permission to let go of attachments to the material world and embrace the knowledge that we “don’t know.”  It is the time in our lives when we can fully enter Dreamtime.  However, because we live in a world that demands we pay our mortgage, rent and other bills, our obligations & responsibilities usually outweigh the need for a retreat or sabbatical.

It is a long cycle and, like all cycles, there is nothing we can do to “get out of it.”  So instead we must merge with the process and accept it as a natural state.  The Neptune Square typically begins at around 40-42 years of age.  The more we don’t know about our life direction (during this cycle) the better off we actually are.

While there are pre-cursors to the mid-life “crisis” of phase of life, the true heart of the phase begins with one of two astrological planetary transits: Neptune Square Neptune or Uranus Opposition to Uranus.  At age 40 I began my Neptune Square amidst the drums of taking on the role of Managing Director for SAMS and manifesting a new partner.  These two events, which transpired in the winter of 2012, were to carry on in various guises throughout the rest of 2012 and into 2013.

Prior to entering my Neptune Square, I believed  that Neptune’s only influence during this transit for me was just an increase my already-strong connection with the dream world.  What I did not realize was how strong that sense of wanting to detach from the material plane would turn out to be.  I was thankful there were middle-world cycles going on during the Neptune Square because of the grounding energy they provided.

As my life shifted during the spring and summer of 2012, I felt an increasing pressure to attend to the call of the dreamtime.  I felt I was living in different life than the one I had toward the end of 2011.  I had been on a precipice of building my shamanic astrology practice and taking on a lot more work and could only feel something coming but was not able to rationalize it.  Back and forth went the pendulum, falling in love, accepting the Managing Director position at SAMS, moving back to Portland, Oregon and engaging in an amplified restructuring of my life.

I benefited during those first few months of this cycle by having a partner (who wasn’t in a Neptune cycle) who was more organized and operating from a more “earthy” perspective.  I was able to have a little clarity as to my life direction and handling of my own business.  On its own, without the overwhelming demands I had from three “jobs” and a relationship, I would have enjoyed nothing better than to spend months by the ocean or mountains (or in them) and sleeping under the stars and near the birds and other animals.  In addition, it would have been very easy to spend time creating new ceremonies to use in my personal life in connection with spirit but also for my own practice and the school.   But, alas, the intensity of working a day job, building my astrological practice and working for SAMS took precedence allowing for little “down-time.”

I liken this Neptune transit to an experience I had in 2007 while touring the upper northwest region of New Mexico (aka the Four-Corners area).  In Chaco Canyon, an ancient site once habited by the so-called Anasazi people, I stood amongst one of the pueblos soaking up the trance-inducing drone of the cicadas.  The sun was bright and warm that day in mid-spring and wildflowers littered the landscape.  A lizard shifted, and then sat on a small outcrop of rock, basking in the energy of our home star, the Sun.  The ruins of the stonework buildings and kivas were overgrown with sage, spring blooms and cacti.  A few flying insects and birds darted here and there.  The message to rest, relax and connect with the land and life was there.  It was an invitation to merge with what was not visible, only sensed and felt.  The worries, responsibilities, obligations, concerns and other attachments had no place there.  It was only a decision to let those things fall away so I could drift about the energies of the area around pueblo and the canyon.  Tranquility radiated from everywhere around there, but not from any specific point.  It simply was there.

That experience is an approximate to what I have termed, the “Call of Neptune.”  It is when the attachments of the middle world are seen more as a hologram or projection than something solid and substantial.  The matter becomes seamless with no definition of a beginning or end.  It simply continues with slight lulls and highs but ever so much in perpetuity.

By the end of 2012, with Saturn also accompanying me on my Midheaven, my job of 5 plus years in the insurance world had come to an end.  Moving into 2013, the transit of Neptune showed the impermanence of the relationship with my intimate partner, dissolving the structure that once held the earthen bonds strong.  A slow but steady shifting occurred by early spring.  Lost and melancholy are two words that describe this period well but somewhere deep within there was guidance.  The inevitable drawing away from my partner to live on my own resulted in the full breaking of the relationship.

Great motivation to live on my own came more from instinct that I resolutely needed the space to dream and create and perhaps build.  While clarity would occur on occasion, the fogginess continued like the rainy season in Portland in most years, unabated.

But to what purpose is this fogginess I experience?  Ah, but that is exactly the answer: to create a state of confusion in order to clear the material clutter that clogs the soul.  It is to move less with the ego and more from a place of heart.   Confusion means the Neptune transit is working.  It is a matter of trusting in the process, or in other words, of having faith that we are being drawn in alignment with our soul’s original intent.  Confusion opens the doors for new information, for new transmissions and visions.  It leads to the life we have been waiting to live.

END OF PART 1