Ghost Towns of the Mind

Breaking free from enchanted stories that bind us

They say that if you want to train an elephant, you need to get it when it's small. Tie it to a tree with rope that is too strong for it to break, and then wait. Eventually, the elephant will learn that it is too weak to break the rope when it is tied up. And it will stop trying, even when it is big enough to tear up the tree by the roots.

It's easy to become trained on your limitations. You try something once. You really give it a good effort, and you can't do it. Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, right? So, you stop trying.

The thing is... The inability to see when things have changed and the impossible has become possible again is a form of distorted thinking, too. And so is a failure to recognize that the true cause of your problem is an obstacle that can be surmounted with more knowledge or a different approach.

For a long time, I tied myself in knots.

For as long as I can remember, I've admired people who can sew. When I was a baby, a neighbor made me a quilt, and I was fascinated by the way the squares held together with invisible thread.

I grew up and bought a sewing machine, a dress pattern, and some beautiful fabric. I lay the creased fabric out on the living room carpet and started cutting around the tissue paper pattern with blunt scissors. In less than an hour, the fabric and pattern were ruined.

In retrospect, it's amazing that I got as far as I did without good tools or technique. Instead, what I learned from this experience was that I wasn't precise enough to sew, so I stopped trying.

Twenty years later, I moved to a town that defines itself by cows and quilts. Wanting to understand the place I live, I signed up for a quilting class, not expecting to actually learn how to quilt. After all, I don't have the precision for quilting.

At first, the class met my expectations. I upgraded from scissors and carpet to a rotary cutter and a cutting mat, but my lines still weren't straight. Then, my teacher gently asked me for my rotary cutter and put in a new blade. And, suddenly, my cuts were as clean as everyone else's in the class.

I love sewing just as much as I thought I would, but I missed out on the joy of sewing for twenty years because I couldn't tell the difference between a personal limitation and the limitations of my tools. I told a story about why I wasn't sewing. That story was a lie, but it became true because I was under the sway of its enchantment.

Neptune is the planet of enchantment.

It creates a fog of unknowing that hides possible routes we might take, funneling us into a particular narrative that says, "This is the way the world works. It is what it is."

Neptune is so good at weaving enchantments that we believe his stories are true. Then, he wanders off and tells another story, leaving us to believe that the actors in the old play are still on stage, and the false fronts are real buildings, and the show goes on. So we stay in the ghost town and become ghosts ourselves.

Right now, Neptune is changing the story on us.

The old rules no longer apply, and we are scrambling to understand the new game. It is a scary moment, all the more so because as Neptune moves from Pisces to Aries, it is shifting from the sign of the Mystic to the sign of the Warrior.

Are those Viking ships on the horizon? How am I, a peaceful spiritual person, supposed to defend myself with this illuminated manuscript in my hands?

(Those illuminated manuscripts did quite a lot, actually, but it took a long time.)

Now, more than ever, it is necessary for us to ensure that we aren't being bound up by false narratives and false limitations. For fourteen years, we have been taught by Neptune in Pisces that we are small and helpless against the great forces of the universe, that our attempts to direct our own destiny are pointless, and that the universe takes care of people who put their heads down and go with the flow.

None of these things are true anymore, but we will never know that unless we break the enchantments that bind us, make a break from everything we have learned, and head off into the unknown.

The first step is learning to see Neptune's enchantments for what they are: just stories. And begin the process of re-dreaming them.

This is the work of Narrative Astrology.