Follow the yellow brick road . . .
Two roads diverged and I, I took the one less traveled by . . .
All roads lead to Rome.
Humans seem to love to refer to roads when they are thinking about their life's journey. From the straight and narrow to the road that takes you "you know where," roads are a metaphor for life's condition.
But what happens when you lose the road?
Where I grew up, we sometimes had fogs so thick you literally could not see an arm's length away from your face. Sounds were altered, too, muffled by the thick fog. The world would narrow to a tiny circle of visibility around you; all else disappeared.
If you tried to travel in a fog, you were venturing into dangerous territory. One misstep and you were lost. You could not see ahead to where you were going, and once you took the first step, retreat was equally difficult. You might find a landmark in a fog, but it would rear up at you suddenly, out of nowhere, and its appearance would seem strangely distorted. Nothing, in fact, was quite as it appeared.
Welcome to the realm of Neptune, planet of mist, fogs, and illusions. Neptune is much more than that, of course. Neptune speaks of the deep desire within us all to be free of the boundaries that limit us and to merge into the infinite heart of all things.
There's a bit of a paradox here. We long to merge, to lose ourselves in the universal light. But when we open up the boundaries of our own identity, we teeter at the edge of reality as we know it, and our own grasp of who and what we are can vanish in an instant. Then we find ourselves lost in the fog, confused and without direction.
Like all the great outer planets, the power of Neptune must be treated with respect. Locate Neptune in your birth chart, and you will find a place of magic and mystery, wonder and the power of unlimited imagination . . . but also a place where you can be blind and stumble in denial. Neptune is all about the ideal, the perfect, so its sign and aspects will give us valuable information on the ideals that motivate our lives - fueling our highest achievements but also sometimes leading us astray into extremism.
