A guide to the end of the Saturn-Neptune astrological cycle, till Feb 2026
This Summer, a trip to Portugal that was supposed to be barely three weeks long ended up with my husband and I living abroad for three months. We lived in my deceased dad-in-law’s deep-in-the country house, reachable only by a little dirt road, surrounded by dry summer fields of hay and bright violet thistle, olive trees, and cork-oak forested hills.
We had buyers for the house: an enthusiastic international couple — she’s Brazilian, he’s Dutch —ready to make a permaculture haven out of the fruit-tree laden land.
Until we finally closed on the house, on August 20th, our buyers’ bank kept us on absolute tenterhooks, cancelling our closing appointment — not once, not twice, but three times (!!!)— each time completely last minute. Plus, utterly disregarding that both parties were moving heaven and earth to close on this house. Instead, only hours before each appointment, they would suddenly flag obscure issues that could have been resolved with a bit of notice, announced paperwork had been lost or confused. Applications had to be resubmitted, egos needed to prevail, and more.
The fourth and final attempt stuck (and even that one had to be slightly changed at the last minute), leaving our buyers, at LONG last, free to move into their new dream home, and leaving Merlin and myself free to resume regularly scheduled programming.
In those three months abroad, we had more utterly bizarre occurrences all in a row than ever in our lives. Given that our life is one giant bubbling cauldron of synchronicity and unlikely events, that’s saying something.
And though it was weird, and hard at times, we got a ticket from the universe to live outside of chronos — calendar and clock time — immersed instead, in kairos — numinous time — for the duration of the season. Every dismantled plan was replaced with a surprisingly better outcome, as long as we played along using kairos-logic.
It was a bit like stepping bodily into a dream. In the dreamscape, the rules and the logic are bizarre by our waking mind’s standards. With an Alice-in-Wonderland-like dimension to navigate, we needed some time to adapt. Once we figured out what dream we were in, things relaxed, and we enjoyed the ride as time outside of time. Which brings me to the reason I’m bringing the story of my Summer story up again: right now, we’re in a liminal, “thin-veils-between-dimensions” phase of a planetary cycle (which I’ll unpack more below) that’s energetically very reminiscent of falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland — or a lot like the 2000’s movie Waking Life.
(Some of you have asked if I’ll write more about our weird Portugal tale. I’m chronicling the parts that can be shared, which I’ll publish as separately, to offer as my own lived examples of the concrete of the energies I’m tracking and exploring in this post. Hopefully they can be inspiration and jumping-off points for you to further pinpoint how they may be dancing in your own life now. Stay tuned! ).
In his book, “Sidewalk Oracles”, author and teacher of active dreaming Robert Moss writes about Kairos and Chronos, as dual faces of Time:
“Kairos is jump time, opportunity time, the special moment that you seize or miss. In Kairos moments, you may feel you have been released from linear time or that powers from outside time have irrupted into your world. The Greeks personified Kairos as a young, fleet-footed god, completely bald except for a curling lock falling over his forehead. Hence the phrase ‘seize time by the forelock.’ If you meet this fellow on the road and fail to seize the moment, you’ll find him very hard to catch. Kairos is slippery.
(…) In the ancient world, you knew a god was present because everything started to quiver or shimmer. The special moment was itself a god. We now know his name, Kairos. He is the antithesis of the old god Chronos. While Chronos represents linear time, the time that moves relentlessly in one direction, time that binds, Kairos represents that special moment in which you can break the bonds and operate in a spacious Now.”
The Saturn-Neptune Cycle
We’re on the final roughly six months of a thirty-six year planetary dance between planets Neptune and Saturn. They’ll begin a new thirty-six year cycle starting in late February 2026 with a conjunction in the sign of Aries. Whether you’re into astrology or not, I will do my best to make this brief breakdown easily accessible and as hype-free as possible, as I know the internet is filled sensationalism around every little astrological transit. Not everything is The Most Powerful and Transformational Portal of All Time, but we do happen to be in a multi-year period full of era-level endings and beginnings. My aim here is to help articulate what we’re seeing in the world at large and to give context to the blurring, bendy boundaries of what reality feels like right now — with an emphasis on what we can do to make the best of a tricky-to-navigate collective process.
This period, as we close the current Saturn-Neptune cycle, is an important liminal time that asks a lot of us, but which can provide the seeds of a dynamic new beginning, starting February next year. These two planets last met in Capricorn, the sign of structure and material mastery, in 1989. To get a feeling of some of what that conjunction set into motion in the world collectively, check out these two articles: this brief one by Dennis Sutton of Astrology for Aquarius, and this deep-dive one by Cycles of History
In a nutshell, these cycles between solar system planets, known as synodic cycles, are about the meeting of two archetypes: two energetically distinct fields, or deities (if your metaphysics leans that way). As they meet, they set in motion a project of sorts, a container, a spiritual merger, which reflects each of their essences and motives coming into form as something greater than the sum of its parts. Now, Saturn and Neptune have extremely contradictory agendas, so their meeting requires us to bridge paradoxes:
Saturn is the master of the material and of third dimensional life, and as such, we often see this planet’s face reflected in the world as obstacles, limitations, isolation, scarcity and frustrated plans. That’s not all that Saturn is good for, nor the deeper point of what he teaches, but we do tend to notice him in the ways life seems to say “no” to us. The true gift of Saturn is our development of grit and excellence as core tools to becoming a person of wisdom: an elder who can guide others through the difficult passages of life to become the best they can be. To learn these skills, we have to be tested by life — and rise up to the occasion.
Neptune is our guide to transcendence. In some ways, it’s the opposite of Saturn in the ways that it asks us to disregard the third dimensional reality in favor of the imaginal, visionary, and/or spiritual. Neptune fosters the dissolution of containment into oneness — for better or for worse, as this can look like poor psychological or physical boundaries, for instance, as much as it can show up as spiritual enlightenment.
Yet Neptune is also the longing in your soul that draws wordless tears from your eyes with its aching beauty.
If we believe we can touch, and be in relationship with that heartwrenching, ineffable pull — through art, poetry, spirituality, heart-centered connection, meditation, psychic practices, or communion with nature— we’ll land on Neptune’s good side. If we disregard that holy longing, if we’re cynical about it (and therefore place it somewhere elusive or unattainable in our mindscape), we’ll be bound to reach for a replacement. Typical substitutes for our intrinsic need for transcendence are drugs and alcohol, media, and unhealthy relationships, but there are countless other tantalizing surrogates for a real relationship with the sacred.
When Neptune and Saturn come together, boundaries and limits (whether positive or negative in our human perception) are eroded and dissolved in order for new forms to be able to emerge. What’s stable and solid becomes fluid, and then turns to mist. At the same time, new dreams, visions, and ideals emerge from the field of all potential to be given form, as Neptunian gifts. It’s Saturn’s job then to engineer the material containers that will house those dreams in the world.
Cycles
To simplify, we can think of every planetary cycle as having phases, just like the eight phases of the moon.
Image via Wikipedia, credit: Andonee (Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
When two planets meet in the sky in a conjunction, they initiate a cycle that relates to each of their energies coming together.
The conjunction is a new beginning, setting a wave or process into motion, which culminates at the metaphorical “full moon”, the midpoint of the cycle. After this point, the cycle begins to wind down for the second half. We can think of these cycles as mirroring the energies of birth, maturity, aging and death, or akin to the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.
As the planet of structure and the planet of formlessness complete the cycle they’ve been on together since 1989, we’ve found ourselves since roughly 2023, in what amounts to a multi-year “waning moon” energy, with both of them being together in the sign of Pisces. Pisces, being the last zodiac sign, adds to the “ending” and “letting go” quality. And the last eighth of the cycle, known as the balsamic phase, has a “darkest before the dawn” feel to it. This stage before the new beginning is a period where what’s taken form and come to fruition through the previous stages, is stripped down or even stripped away, so that we can find what the essence is underneath all the trappings. What was this story really about?
Or in other words:
What truly matters, so much so that nothing external can distract or confuse you about it? What is left if appearances are taken away? What are we now letting go of? The answers to these questions might come to us as things that seemed solid, or that we had come to take for granted, reveal themselves as ephemeral.
This isn’t a breezy comment. At the global level, Saturn and Neptune’s cycle has been one of the key forces propelling us into the midst of an objective “things falling apart” polycrisis with radical and absurd levels of injustice, infrastructure and environmental destruction, genocide and unforeseen consequences for human beings and the more-than-human alike.
So this is a yes/and contemplation, and to my mind, a way we can get behind some of the metaphysical thrust for the crisis state of the world, which is by acknowledging that we’re in co-creation with cosmic powers.
We’re used to “dreams” being framed as the opposite of “reality”. This balsamic phase between Saturn and Neptune is about upending that dichotomy: an invitation — however uncomfortable — to claim our generative power, through which dreams, ideas and desires become realities. When the veils between dimensions are thin is exactly when we can grasp which single string we can pull on that makes the most difference, as distractions fall away and the essential makes itself known. This is the same logic by which we ask what people on their death bed regret, or wish they had done more of: they’re able to see, with crystal clarity, their true priorities when life is condensed to a single point.
The thing is, too — and this feels extra important to highlight — that the winding down of a cycle can be utterly blissful. Yes, for some of us, there will be legitimate grief or loss, and intense, fierce and wrenching disintegration of what we hold to be stable, dear, or true. For some others, there will be an experience of liberation, lightness, the freedom and expansion of no expectations as old labels and identities fall away. Some of us will be experiencing both these extremes. Be open to the luminous making itself known in every case.
Not Yet Across
The picture at the top of this article is of a painting I made this Spring.
I’ve been learning to read the I Ching, and without meaning to, as I was contemplating the time-mysteries and chaotic collective waves, I outlined above, as much as my personal experiences of things falling apart this year, I painted something that felt quite connected to the last Hexagram of the I Ching, commonly translated as Not Yet Across, or Before Completion.
In the briefest of summaries, if you’re unfamiliar (I’m definitely not doing justice to its complexity here), the I Ching is an ancient Chinese oracle comprised of 64 symbols, each representing the interplay of two elemental forces. Each of these symbols, called hexagrams, comes with a divinatory poem.
Hexagram 64, the last in the series, reads (courtesy of LiSe):
Not yet across, expansion. The little fox almost crosses over. It wets its tail. No ground for fruitfulness.
The great image says: Fire above water: not yet across. The noble one is cautious when differentiating things so that each finds its place.
I’d been intuitively moved to paint a fox, and for a number of my own I Ching readings, this hexagram came up. Once I’d finished the painting, I realized the connection, and it feels utterly appropriate to the energies I’m unpacking here.
The symbolism, as I understand it, is about when we see the finish line in a process or project, but as things complete, we enter a liminal moment in which things are suspended in mid-air, so to speak. If we rush to begin anew in that in-between space, we are sure to miss something important.
The paradox, of course, is that the final symbol of this divinatory system is called “Before Completion” and not just “Completion”. The second-to-last symbol, number 63, ironically, is called “After Completion”. Hinting at cyclical time, the wisdom of this oracle is to remind us that when things come to an end, our best approach is to be discerning about where our energy truly belongs and what to de-tangle from or release. This can require quite a bit of patience as the new makes itself known by degrees.
Sarah Denning encapsulates this energy as follows in her book “Everyday I Ching”:
“It is a difficult time. There is great potential for change to a much better situation, but nothing is settled yet. You must be determined to achieve your goal. The problem is knowing how to go about it in the best way. You are being pulled in different directions and must make sense of the confusion. Decisions have to be made. Yet nothing in your past experience can guide you in this instance. First, you must be absolutely clear in your own mind what you want the outcome to be. Make sure that each step you take leads you in that direction. Proceed with the utmost caution. Use your common sense. Be streetwise and adaptable. Stay on the alert for signs that your approach is not working. If this happens, stop and consider what might be a more effective way. Be very wary. Provided you take nothing for granted, success is guaranteed.”
Time Magic
Recently I had an outstanding reading with a psychic medium. One little, almost throwaway thing she said was, “I’m seeing the book ‘The Sword in The Stone’… not the movie, but the book”.
If you’re not familiar with either, the movie being the most well-known of the two, it’s a Disney adaptation of the magician Merlin’s tutelage of Arthur as a child, before he became the mythical king of Camelot. Obviously, I thought this was a symbolic reference to my husband’s name, Merlin, and I said as much. After my reading though, I thought I should check out the book (which I’d never read) just in case there was something more there for me. What jumped out was the book’s emphasis on Merlin being essentially a time-traveler — he’s said to have lived backwards in time, experiencing what for everyone else is the future as his past. This is an invitation I want to extend to you now.
Right now, opening our senses to a different flow of time is a great use of the energies available. Chronos is Saturn’s greek name, which reminds us that this planet works with us on making the most of the passage of time through gaining valuable experience and choosing each next stage of maturity consciously. As Neptune adds a strong dose of oceanic dissolution to the mix during this final period in their current cycle, any restrictive, un-magical relationships with the passage of time can be reworked, and we can slip out of the paradigm of time as jailer or taskmaster.
Here are some suggestions to try:
We can allow ourselves to attune the flow of synchronicity. To do so meaningfully, it’s helpful to first tap into what we’re really wanting, really struggling with — to get very, VERY honest and real in where we’re at. No judgment and no sugar coating, no spiritualizing and no “shoulds”. Just the transparent truth of our current moment. Then, we cast our wish or question into the Universe with as much sincerity and feeling as is available to us. And we let the Universe answer.
Allowing these responses from the Universe to become guideposts for our next steps, we continue the back and forth dialogue as co-creators — not necessarily following blindly, but stepping into a generative conversation with the forces that support our life’s unfolding. From my own experience, doing this has the potential to pull us into a slipstream of incredible opportunities that wouldn’t be otherwise accessible to us. Clearly, it matters then that we pay attention, keeping track of our intentions and what we receive in response — journaling is very helpful here. If you need more to go on than this in-a-nutshell suggestion, you can check out my in-depth synchronicity guide.
Another thing to cultivate is a practice of using imagination to re-write or re-script particular events in our timelines, crafting more positive, healing or uplifting scenarios in place of damaging or simply repetitive ones. Whether you believe that any resulting changes arise out of an objective “timeline jump” or simply out of the attitude shift and/or emotional expansion that can occur from envisioning alternatives to deep-set grooves of painful or stuck memories and experiences, what matters most here is to play with this space of possibility. This is a time for our artistic, creative instinct to come to the forefront, where we play with our materials and experiment — except time and experience itself can be our medium.
If you’re looking for a template to do this — feel free to experiment, tweak and adapt — I can recommend fellow intuitive Anna Sayce’s excellent guide on the process of “revision”, as first taught by New Thought teacher Neville Goddard. (I’m not affiliated with Anna in any way, I just think she’s offering some fantastic free resources on her website). Another approach (which doesn’t gel with me personally but some of you might find useful) is Brian Hubbard’s Time Light process, which he outlines as a 21-day program in the book of the same name.
Finally, now is a time to get very, very sensitive to the subtle changes in our intuitive signals. Important messages might arrive in a quieter volume than usual, making it easy to bypass them and then regret it when we recognize after the fact that we actually knew this decision/path/connection/collaboration/move wasn’t right for us all along. As the established order of Saturn’s last thirty-six years unravels to make way for new systems and ways of doing things, the chaos and clamor can get way too loud. We may be pulled in a million directions, and we may try to cling to what once offered safety in a “better the devil you know” spirit. Know that the right direction for you is being whispered into your heart, if not literally, then in the form of dreams, bodily sensations, knowings and heart-desires.
Heeding these signals doesn’t mean we need to bypass the troubles around us, but be very intentional in what is “ours to do” and therefore a true contribution to life, and what, emphatically, isn’t ours to put energy into. It’s as though each of us has a very specialized job assigned to us at the moment, and we need to be doing exactly that job, and nobody else’s.
I’ll offer the floor to Robert Moss again:
“To become a kairomancer, you need to learn to trust your feelings as you walk the roads of this world, to develop your personal science of shivers, to recognize in your gut and your skin and in free-floating impressions that you know far more than you hold on the surface of consciousness. You need to take care of your poetic health, reading what rhymes in a day or a season. You want to expect the unexpected, to make friends with surprises, and never miss that special moment. The kairomancer understands that the time is always Now, except when the time is GO.”
Over To You
How are you navigating this time of endings and beginnings? Are you playing with bendy time? Anything else that came up for you from reading?
