Through the Eyes of Love
by
Sarah Varcas
As the month comes to a close Neptune, the planet of divine love and human delusion, sits opposite the Sun, diffusing its energetic rays into patterns of empathy and compassion or overwhelm and confusion. How we experience this particular alliance, which occurs once a year, will largely depend upon how well we can keep our heads above emotional water and we would be wise to cut ourselves and other people some slack during this final bit of the month because we’ve all been through the mill to some extent in the past few weeks!
The degree of the exact opposition speaks of issues of safety and risk, what we sacrifice to be secure and what we risk to be fulfilled. They remind us that the realisation of potential often lives the other side of a willingness to lose something cherished in favour of gaining something else altogether more precious. The precious thing is often an intangible quality of life: freedom, authenticity, openness. The thing lost, often a more material or tangible concern: another person, a job, financial security. So often the fear of losing something we can see, touch, hold and identify with in the present becomes the obstacle to gaining the intangible prize at the other side of loss.
The energies of this month may well have brought us to a place where we need to let go of some fairly significant things. This is rarely easy, even when we know it’s for the absolute good. The occurrence of this opposition now reminds us to maintain a divine perspective as much as possible, to keep an eagle-eye view from above rather than the worm’s eye view from down here on the ground. The key to understanding Neptune is to recognise that it sees nothing but love, in everything. No matter what it encounters, it sees the love within it and matches that love in response, even when, to our human minds and hearts, it is the most dreadful and depressing reality that we face. It is of no surprise that it brings us both divine love and human delusion all in the same moment, for nothing confuses us more than the notion of divine love! Wars have been fought over it no less! Faith gained and lost over the question ‘Why does ‘God’ [whatever and whoever you perceive that to be] allow suffering?’. Because, from a human perspective, love and suffering are polarities, never to be reconciled.
Neptune can barely fathom our take on such matters. It looks into the heart of a killer and sees the love they never received, that they cannot feel for themselves or anyone else, the deep well of loneliness from which is drawn hatred and despair. It looks into the heart of the greedy oppressor and sees an empty vacuum where a heart was once awaiting ignition that never came. It looks into the heart of the marginalised in society and sees the need for an upwelling of love in all beings to engulf them and bring them into the centre of the universal heart in which we all belong. Everything is seen through the eyes of love. Neptune knows no other way to view the world. So whilst we bemoan our fate, weep at the state of the world or wonder how such callousness can exist, Neptune invites us to look through its eyes and see where the love is, where it is needed, how to apply it. It shows us how even the darkest and most painful times can become a trigger for love, within and without, if we let them.
This opposition poses a challenge: do we live the pain or live the love? Do we embrace the struggles as another chance to embody the divine or as something which separates us from it? Answering these questions within the very fabric of our daily lives is a life-long journey of discovery. One which takes us to the heights and depths of joy and despair as we begin to discover that in all of them love is there. It can never be absent, no matter how far we feel we have strayed from its embrace. Love is everything, woven so intimately through it that we often fail to see it there. Our preconceptions of what it should look like edit out so much of its presence. But Neptune never gives up for it knows that even our misunderstanding about what love is, is simply one more call for love to arise in our hearts, clearing the fog from our eyes. As the eagle soars high above, seeing everything below in great detail none the less, Neptune oversees us seeing everything as love, no matter how we experience its presence.
‘See through my eyes’, Neptune whispers, ‘they will show you love unbounded and undefined, everywhere and all around. And you will know, no matter what, that only love surrounds you’.
Sarah Varcas
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