Welcome to my Astro Advice Column! If you subscribe to my Astro-Kats or Star Kids Club groups you are able to ask me questions about astrology for this advice column.
I’m embarking upon my Neptune square Neptune transit and would love advice on how to deal with all the fuzz. I feel constantly convinced of different daydreams that pass quickly.
–Middle aged Capricorn
Hello Middle aged Capricorn. It’s great to get a question like this from you.
I am aware of the irony here at hand. I am thirty years old. You are my elder and ask me of middle age, a phase of life that I am only beginning this year (astrological middle age is from thirty to sixty). You have to keep in mind that I am Chinese. I feel that I am looking up at you when you ask me this question.
I can only guide you to the work of others—Sam Reynolds did a NORWAC presentation about thriving in your forties. Virginia Bell wrote a book called Midlife is not a Crisis that mentions the Neptune square.
I look in Bell’s book and find that she invites you to take the Neptune square as the kind of grand silence nuns do after dinner and until the following day’s breakfast. “You only find your own voice when you listen,” she quotes a friend who entered a convent as saying. She writes that the Neptune square is when your monkey mind lets go of the bait that traps it in a cage, when we untrap ourselves from the things we thought we needed to have, the things we thought we needed to do, and the motivations that we assumed we could not let go of. She warns against using substances or watching too much TV during this time because this can make you feel busier. It is best not to be too busy during this time.
She then talks about the suspense of aging. “Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense,” she quotes Magnon McLaughlin saying.
It sounds like you’ve been daydreaming lately. I love that for you. I wonder what separates the fuzz of the dream from its core. You mentioned being convinced of your dreams and then letting time pass you by.
Isn’t that Neptunian? To find yourself invisible in your grand silence? I don’t know if you identify as a gender or if you feel less or more visible at all but I’m captivated by the idea of someone being able to see more and hear more in that silence.
Erin Suillivan, in her book The Astrology of Midlife and Aging, says that the Neptune square in your early forties is when you are no longer who you once were but “certainly not yet who you are about to become.” She quotes Murray Stein, who wrote In Midlife and also the famous book Map of the Soul that the BTS album was based off of, as saying that “midlife is a crisis of the spirit.”
There can be depression in the Neptune square. There is also, according to Sullivan, idealism. This fills me with hope, the idea that there are some idealisms that one must earn with age.
Write your daydreams down. Turn them into stories, into poems. Make a series of sigils from them. Get involved in theater.
I can only really give you recommendations and technical information. Remember that your Saturn opposition happens around this time as well. This is the second time this has happened, the first time being when you were fifteen.
Is there anything you were sure about when you were thirty that you are no longer sure about? Have you changed your mind about anything since then?
When I talk to people who are in their mid forties, it often feels like it’s a stage where they know that the life that has lived has been lived. I notice that people go through tremendous inner growth and that they know how to go about it in a way that is slow enough to be steady but fast enough to surprise themselves. I think people surprise themselves around this time.
Remember your daydreams. They seem significant. Analyze them. Scale them up and then scale them down. See if your family members have ever dreamed about the same symbols before. There may be dreams that have been waiting until you have reached the midpoint of life to reach you.
