For the last seven days I have been spending my time hanging out as chef, dance partner and company mother with dancers, musicians and clowns from around the world. What a fitting way to meet a Full Moon while Neptune turns from retrograde to direct in Aquarius — my Sun and Mercury sign. Over the last twelve years, of all the places that Neptune has taken me, this one feels so much like home.
It wasn’t always this way. I first began to know Neptune as an intruder. Twelve years ago, I was managing a contract office for the city — scaling my way up the promotion ladder to a division manager position — when there was a pull that was eating away at my edges like water to a newspaper. It was dissolving the tight precision that had become my life. The exactitude of the job was wearing me down. I felt under an immense pressure to leave. I was burned out. Even the people around me who supported my career advancement were stepping away or asked to leave, one by one, replaced by people who did not know me, and did not care to. Neptune’s entry into my Aquarian Sun was melting down all my previous ambitions for a high climb to the top of a public sector peak. I began questioning what was really there in the first place. I began questioning who I was. What was I, really? I admit those days were scary.
Yet, even as I was feeling crushed staying at that job, I was torn by some of those aspirations of mine that had no practical application towards bringing in a paycheck. I’ve always been a ‘good girl’, happy to stay the straight and narrow: a nice 9-to-5 with a steady paycheck and a retirement plan. My life was a constant struggle between my need for security and my far deeper aspirations that I was too fearful to explore. Theater to me was like a vent hole for a whale. I allowed myself freedom only on stage when I performed and nowhere else.