Sophia's Children

There are some cycles, passages, or even life-purposes that fly (or flow) in direct opposition to the more Saturnine, Capricornian, structured, hierarchical, “Puritan work ethic” oriented norm that is  celebrated in much of Western culture, and certainly in the U.S. culture.

If you’ve been Neptuned, by innate pattern (aka you were born that way) and/or by transformational cycle or life-passage, you’ll know what I mean.

In astrology, the archetypes of Neptune, Pisces, and the 12th House speak to the attributes of water, flow, dissolution, formlessness, Divine Love, the great sea of being, going with the flow … you get the drift, no pun intended.

Look at any geological landscape, and see the effects of water on even the hardest stone to reshape form.

Consider the ocean, and you’ll have another sense of the immense boundaryless, formlessness of it.

Similarly, these forces in our lives move through just like water — sometimes persistently trickling water that slowly softens hard edges, and sometimes like flood waters that wreak havoc — reshaping or completely dissolving the worldviews, order, habits, and structures that have shaped our lives up to that point.

And there is a point, a purpose, and a meaning to it, or there can be if we look to discern it.

But it’s also very much about the rather out-of-control, fear-inducing experience of like-it-or-not surrender, faith, grace, the Big Love, empathy, compassion, rather than the clearly visible, structured, guaranteed, well-mapped and well-known  supposed certainties of terra-firma landscapes.

Anyone who’s lived through this sort of relentless passage of form dissolving and reshaping (or unshaping), no matter your best and most adept, effort-full attempts to hold things together, has an inherent understanding of how these archetypal energies work.

They don’t require you to “opt in,” though it’s likely helpful when we finally do.

(Pluto is a similarly unrelentingly deconstructive archetypal passage, or transit, and has its own unique transformative signature.)

The fact is that it’s hard to explain or articulate such experiences in words, even for those who are gifted in words. It, in some ways, transcends definition and articulation, and that, too, has the imprint of Pisces and Neptune.

But we try to put it into words, either to share the wisdom of the experience — particularly in times when the long-marginalized, suppressed Feminine, right-brain ways of being are re-emerging to keep us from a wholesale catastrophe-in-the-making — or because we’re trying to explain the enormous change in our lives and beings to those who just don’t, won’t, or can’t understand it.

I appreciated coming across someone else’s Neptune – 12th house story today, by way of Anne Whitaker’s article, “Contemplating the 12th House – An Optimist’s Take on Self-Undoing.”

I recognized my own journey in Anne’s words, and even relative to the same long timeframe (Neptune through Aquarius, 1998-2010+), and wanted to pass her story along since it might resonate with some of you, too.

For some who have this ‘wiring’, or who have had the lengthy dissolution passages, it’ll be very relevant, affirming, and insightful.

But with Neptune passing through Pisces now (and for quite some time yet), everyone to some degree is getting Neptuned (or 12th Housed) at the moment, too, so perhaps you’ll find inspiration and insight here, too.

In her article about her own experience (excerpted from her memoir on the same), Anne writes:

“Being able to see our tiny lives as diamond sparks in relation to and part of the ‘dazzling darkness’ of Eternity, finding our own way to frame and live out this relationship – whether it be through conventional religious affiliations or whatever framework fits our particular era, culture, and psychological makeup – this is a big task for anyone.

But it seems to me to be the particular one that we 12th-house folk are asked to undertake to a greater extent than other people are.

This challenge, which at times is very painful and disruptive to ordinary dimensions of life, appears to demand periodic sacrifice, renunciation, and withdrawal from the ‘real’ world into that world whose compass is oriented to Eternity.”

Read Anne’s full article here.

Big Love, Jamie