I shall start with a pretentious quote so that you think I am smart and dignified.

“Liminality is entered through the internal experience of loss and burial of a former sense of self. There is a break in psychological continuity, and the experience of the self and others takes on a different feeling, as though what had formerly been solid now is unreal.”

-Murray Stein

Liminality is on the brain right now: like I mentioned a few posts back, 2026 is more like 2025 until about May/June and then the energy shifts pretty rapidly, since Saturn will be far enough from Neptune to feel more like typical Saturn in Aries, Uranus will be back in Gemini, Jupiter will be in Leo, and Pluto-Neptune-Uranus will be doing the grand sextile thing they did last summer again, so not only will things be different, they will be actionable and moving.

And yet here we sit with Mercury, Mars, and the north node in Pisces, and with Saturn close enough to Neptune (ruler of Pisces) to Piscese-ize it into being nebulous and weird (still, since Saturn just left Pisces in the first place). There's a sense of wondering why you can't get the things done that seem like they should be so (fucking) easy. It's a period where things have changed enough that the old rules don't apply (cause and effect are BACK) but the new rules aren't obvious: a liminal place.

Liminality is a fluid state but you have to think of it as an Alice in Wonderland phenomenon: if you break the old rules by leaving a job or a location or a relationship or you move or have a baby, these are easily disruptive actions that require a "new normal." You're not where you were and not fully where you're going, so who are you in the meantime?

I think the overall experience of a temporary state depends on how temporary it is and whether you know where you're going. The astrological greats Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas attribute liminality to Mercurial energy, but I'd argue the moon is a major factor, too, because both are involved in whether or not you can adapt and improvise in new environments or whether you require the care and feeding of a king who does not squeeze his own toothpaste. So if you're in between "there" and "here" it's those two, because you're either rapidly adapting or not.

But what if you are in a long-ass phase of liminality, where something ends and you have no idea where the hell you're going? It's rare, but it happens. If you're being asked "who are you when you're nobody?" that's much more of a Neptune phenomenon. This is where its status as god of the sea comes into play in full relief. Think about what it meant several centuries ago to travel by boat, leaving everything behind, heading into uncharted waters, not sure if you'll ever see home again: the upside is you can be whoever you want to be because no one knows any better and you can change all your habits and your whole personality if you want.

What's the modern-day equivalent of that, though? You see it a lot in people who are usually in the center of sort of scandal and lose a career or marriage or entire lifestyle very quickly and unceremoniously, often due to some shady behavior. The media doesn't cover what happens after that, though, so we just see someone get their shit rocked and everyone chimes in to vilify them and then we forget and move on, leaving the person in question to try to figure out who they are if they are no longer the person they were. Some people hang on to who they were and fight the changes with every fiber of their being, and I think those are the people who suffer more, but others accept their fate and try to figure something out. The problem is when you know what "there" looks like and have no idea where "here" is, it’s a Homeric Odyssey to try to cobble together a sense of knowing where you are. Neptune also likes to put you in weird-ass new environments abruptly, either literally or metaphorically, so you're wandering LAX at 2 in the morning trying to decide if you're now the type of person who stands in the long line at the one grill that's open to get some fries, wondering exactly how delayed your connecting flight actually is. There's something simultaneously deeply isolating and freeing about feeling like a societal outcast, either intentionally (if you set out to sea yourself) or otherwise (oopsie, everyone hates you now). Plus, having the answer to who you are if you're nobody helps you develop a strong-ass sense of self, because you don't have to rely on anything external anymore: it's the silver lining on a very dark cloud. If you ever find yourself in this state, I recommend intentional wandering, at least for a while, while the old identity sheds itself so you don't bring things you don't need into the new identity.

To zoom back in to applicability for everyone, the difficulty with right now is comfort and familiarity with the old rules of how the energy is working, because whether or not we loved Neptune in Pisces and Uranus in Taurus, we at least understood a lack of traction/an absence of consequences (Neptune/Pisces) and material volatility (Uranus/Taurus). Now we are in a scenario where people desperately want to oversimplify things that are hopelessly complicated, which is the Pisces to Aries transition, and what should be intellectual freedom but what's probably going to be a different type of of "those people" vs. "these people" infighting, because Uranus is disruptive and Gemini is your immediate environment/thought process. I'd prefer the former, obviously, but I don't get to pick.

Anyway, I, who stare at energy for far too long because I find it soothing, am looking right at "here," grateful we are no longer "there," and it's like staring at a patch of land that a deep chasm and lack of a bridge prevent me from going to: it's right in front of me. I can SEE it. But it's not here yet. So what do I do in the meantime?