On Leaving a Neptune Line
The last time I was under a Neptune line, I was trapped in a psychologically and sexually abusive partnership traveling through Baja California, Mexico. I had gone down there with the idyllic promise of surfing with other young Mexicans and expats, and writing in a beachside bungalow in the small town of San Juanico. After two months in the remote town, I was bloated and stiff deep into my joints. I shuffled alone up and down the one street, wandered aimlessly around the desert, and I came to be so desperate and depressed that it would take years for me to even remember what had happened during that time. I worked with a local’s horse for $300 USD and drove for 22 hours straight on the first leg back to the states. It wasn’t until I passed through Phoenix that I could breathe with any regularity. I wept numb tears in my truck for the remaining four days of the drive back to New England.
When I moved to Las Vegas, ten years later, I had not yet heard of astrocartography or understood the impact of planetary lines. I knew about my natal chart, I understood basic astrology—I am an explorative Sagittarius sun sign, after all—and I had become very familiar with tarot. It made sense to me that people were drawn to places on a spiritual level, and even those who have been drawn into less than pleasant experiences, in hindsight can recognize a moment they had an inner knowing of the lesson ahead of them. For myself, it would take yet another experience under a Neptune line, a location shrouded in disillusionment, to learn the lesson of overcoming self-deception and grounding myself in authenticity as a guiding principle.
Las Vegas wasn’t my first choice, but I romanticized the idea of being in a high-energy metropolis amidst a vast open desert. It was a year after the end of my marriage and I had done enough therapy and self-work to have the confidence to set out on my own. I had plans to open a private bodywork practice in a place ripe for the impending wave of the wellness revolution. I was ready for big, sun-drenched skies and the dynamism I thought was inherent in such a youthful city.
Very quickly my grand visions in the desert disintegrated, dust in the wind. Massage therapy had been conflated with sex work for so long in Las Vegas that there was no support for independent practitioners, and in fact I was told under the table by officials to lie about my practice. Each attempt to license a physical location was cut short by conflicting information from different authorities. Many times, I was given a raised eyebrow and a half-hearted “good luck” by someone smacking their gum, sending me off to ask another person or department for an answer to my queries. Lots of following up with folks who never seemed to get my emails or phone messages never relayed. And in the most frustrating contradiction, I only seemed to meet folks who had the opposite experience with their alternative businesses, and who offered little help or traction. I struggled with finding community, it was incredibly difficult to make friends.
This was in the summer, and I was also wildly unprepared for the kind of heat that makes your skin feel like a heavy casing, constricting boiling blood and melting muscle tissue. The sun was abrasive and I constantly felt like a simmering pot of human sauce. Instead of being able to peel it away, an invisible, hard crust was forming around the softness and patience that I had so carefully cultivated in the year after my divorce. I became defensive, obstinate. After four months of spinning my wheels and watching my savings dwindle, I conceded. I had to give up the fight against the bureaucracy, the lease for my private practice space, and start looking for work in a municipality that actively devalued my industry at every turn.
I was beside myself with disappointment. Years worth of confidence built in business, the trust in my knowledge and my gifts as desirable to a community, withered at the end of that summer like an ill-planted garden. My savings were dried up, I had drained my resources. I was afraid to move forward. I wasn’t sure how or who I would be if I had to fit into the ideologies and expectations of this place, but there was also no way to go back. There was no refunding what had been spent. The part of me still clinging to an iota of self-worth ravaged my horoscopes and IChing for answers, and threw tarot spreads looking for a deus ex machina. I had left a marriage built on false expectations, healed my heart, and moved to new opportunities that turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. How did I get this so wrong, I wailed on the cold tile floors, betrayed by myself yet again.
There was a month or so of unsubstantiated moving ideas. Thankfully my current partner could see the damage I was causing to myself and he too was feeling the weight of failure and loneliness in Nevada. He wanted to get us out and as fast as possible. I allowed myself to bob along without direction, and got a job that I didn’t have to put stock into. I worked myself to arthritic exhaustion for menial pay and actively tried not to think about the dead end I was inevitably headed for. When an opportunity for my partner created a legitimate plan to move, something snapped into place. Like hearing a sound from outside of a dream, I started to recognize an old disempowering pattern in myself. I was following him, binding myself limply to his plans. My arms seemed tied down to my sides, pinned, dressed for the oven.
In an effort to honor this message from my own body, I spent what I had on an AirBnB for a weekend of hiking in Bryce Canyon. For years, hiking has been my solace and at the sight of the first evergreen, I realized how deeply I missed trees!
I drove four hours north east from Vegas, and in crossing the ridge over the valley of Hatch, UT had the sensation of surfacing. I listened to podcasts about the New Moon, about Human Design, and learned about astrocartography! The first evening there, I looked up my map and there it was. A distinct purple line directly through Las Vegas and down through San Juanico, Baja Sur.
In astrocartography, the planetary lines of your astrological natal chart are depicted over a map of the world. Some planetary aspects are more challenging than others, and Neptune lines tend to have a strong element of disillusionment, escapism, and shady deals. After all, Neptune is associated with water, discerning lucidity, and slipping into the great abyss. What I learned is that Las Vegas lies beneath an aspect of my Neptune line that is generally seen as harmonious with one’s spiritual life. Although detrimental to professional and interpersonal pursuits, the energetic influence came to amplify my spirituality, ritual practice and deepen my meditations. It was also under this line where I was literally called out by name to Human Design. A recognition with which was immediate and natural
The deus ex machina I had been looking for came in the form of rapid and embodied understandings of information for the next 30 hours of that weekend. My heart drummed a rhythm that sustained my corybantic hiking-writing-processing. I overlaid the experiences of Las Vegas and Baja like tracing paper. I could identify the similarities in the murky, watery influence and an overarching understanding of the lessons of both places. What hadn’t been learned the first time had been carried around my neck ever since. I saw how I had abandoned my most authentic self in the effort to achieve an illusory goal that in return challenged my deepest values; and that reconnecting to my intuitive expression would guide me back out of the labyrinth in which I found myself.
I returned to my partner and Las Vegas with clarity and a newly unshakable tenacity to my own direction in life. I was committed to staying until I could afford to move on my own, and it would be somewhere in alignment with my values. I reconnected to that nearly-lost, soft and vulnerable sense of self through learning, meditation, and discernment. I saw where I had allowed myself to be swept under, not just in the past year but in the whole last decade. I could see my destructive patterns like a series of leapfrogs over reality. Finally, I was able to move forward with understanding and an indestructible resolve.
Three months later, driving northwest from Nevada to our new home awaiting us in Oregon, we hit a snow squall on Mt. Hood. The roads were slick and white, and visibility greatly limited. I turned on the headlights, downshifted the U-haul truck and disengaged the tow capacity. As we crawled up around the mountain surrounded on all sides by the driving flurries, a deep and sudden inhale filled my belly, expanded my diaphragm and broadened my shoulders. Floating on the breath for a moment, watching the flakes drift around the trees and the trucks, I was fully expanded. And then I exhaled, unlocked. I had left the longitudinal pull of the Neptune line.
