Somewhere There’s Music

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.

When this Neptunian pull came, it was different from any other pull for freedom I had, particularly those where I felt myself smothered by a relationship, a living condition or an environment. With Neptune, I felt the need to tear myself away from what was once so stable and secure in my entire life, and take a chance. After nearly 20 years as a civil servant, I left the city completely. I spent that first Christmas as a consultant for some contractors I knew, and with a good stash of money from my 401(k) cash out, I took off for a trip to Paris for New Year’s Eve, welcoming in 2000. I chose a great place to begin my first weeks out of self-imposed confinement. Neptune washed me out of my cell. It was a leap off a precipice.

The twelve-year voyage through Neptune in Aquarius has often been an eventful one. I entered therapy. My mother passed away. There were days I thought I would never work or eat, and other days that cash fell out of the sky, unexpected. I became conscious about who I really was — an artist. I had no more parental figures left to censor my choices. I was simultaneously destroyed and reborn cycling in and out of the planetary waves as seaweed flows with the sea. When I put the call out for work it appeared. And when I finally decided I could go back to the workplace, it happened in a matter of weeks, but not before I was able to stretch out creatively, take risks with my acting and writing, and feel more at home with myself, relying on a consciousness out of the realm of control.

Neptune got me used to swimming more deeply into the ocean. It molded me like the sea molds the rocks. Instead of a chisel, it provided a soft constant wearing down of the defenses that had me holding on to false images of myself. With Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius a few years back, I felt guided to my home — the one inside this shell of flesh. Neptune has been with me so long that at first I thought it would never end. But now as it approaches the anaretic degrees of Aquarius, I’m sad to see it go. I needed these many years to get the edges smooth, the voice inside strong, and my heart held in hand with a single open cup.

Each day of the body music festival leading up to the Full Moon was an invitation to open up and create. Musicians came from all corners of the world to share rhythms and sounds and as mother-lover-chef-healer — a far cry from contract administrator — we played together and inspired each other from the stove to the stage. There was a letting loose of possibilities coming from stomping, clapping and singing. We became a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional human family. It was enough for this Aquarian to see the potential beyond the political of what human beings can do when we’re creative together. There was cooperation, joy and love in the rooms where we played.

It’s November 10, 2011. All of the performers have boarded planes bound for home. I still have a kitchen to clean and things to put away, but the Moon is full, Neptune is going forward and somewhere still there’s music. If you’re wondering where Fe-911 went, she’s still here. There was, after all of my fears of the changes that Neptune would bring, nothing to be afraid of. Today, as Neptune begins its goodbyes after a long sojourn in my life, I stand on my own porch, feeling a happy exhaustion of having done what any artist should do: her best. Looking up at the sky, time is telling us — begin again to create the world.