Neptune

This poem draws upon the astrological symbolism of Neptune to explore the uncertain boundary between vision and illusion.

Dreams and powerful feelings can reveal possibilities that reason alone might never permit us to pursue. But they can also tempt us into treating what we deeply desire as though it were already true, perhaps leading to disappointment, pain, and embitterment if it fails to manifest.

The poem does not ask us to stop dreaming or feeling.

It asks whether we can remain open to their possibilities while holding them with discernment.

I have a complicated relationship with hope.

There are times when I feel something with such intensity that the feeling itself seems to carry information. A possibility becomes vivid enough that I can almost inhabit it before it exists.

That experience can be beautiful.

It can also be profoundly misleading.

Neptune became the perfect figure through which to explore that tension. In astrology, Neptune is associated with dreams, imagination, spirituality, idealization, and transcendence—but also illusion, confusion, and the dissolution of boundaries.

That ambiguity is exactly what interested me.

“Illusion or vision
I do not know
For beguiling is your nature”

The difficulty is that vision and illusion can feel remarkably similar from the inside.

Both can arrive as something expansive and compelling. Both can ask us to trust beyond what we can prove. And sometimes we cannot know which one we have encountered until reality eventually answers us.

That creates the central question of the poem:

“So how do I know
That it's safe to feel
These feelings oh so big”

Notice that the question is not simply whether the feelings are true.

It is whether they are safe to feel.

There is vulnerability in allowing ourselves to hope after hope has hurt us before (as it has hurt me many times). Discernment can easily become an attempt to protect ourselves from disappointment by refusing to imagine anything beyond what can already be demonstrated.

But I don't want certainty to become the ceiling of wonder, nor practicality the limit of possibility.

“I truly want to trust
That sometimes it just may be
That stepping off the roof
Without sure proof
Can lead someplace heavenly”

There are possibilities we may never encounter if we require proof before taking any step toward them.

At the same time, possibility is not promise.

That is where the final line lands for me:

“With a humbler discerning stature”

I don't think discernment requires diminishing the feeling. Nor does honoring a feeling require believing every story I might construct around it.

I can let a dream be beautiful without insisting it is prophecy.

I can take intuition seriously without declaring it infallible.

I can allow possibility to move me without demanding that reality fulfill the particular future I have imagined.

Perhaps the humility is simply admitting: I feel this deeply, and I still don't know.

For me, learning to hold both may be the wiser way to dream.