Neptune sextile the Ascendant transit: meaning, duration and advice

Here Neptune sits sixty degrees from your Ascendant, and the two signs involved get along: fire and air, earth and water. Depending on your birth time, the planet of mists is then moving near your 11th house, the house of friendships, circles and shared ideals, or near your 3rd house, the house of words, learning and siblings. Nothing is imposed on your image: ideas are whispered to it. And since a point sixty degrees from the Ascendant forms a trine to the Descendant, the person facing you is bathed in the same softness. What gets activated is the happy porosity of your presence to the inspirations drifting by.

The mood is light, almost imperceptible, and that is its signature. A friend takes you along to a concert or into a watercolor workshop, and you walk out carrying yourself a little differently. A sentence read on a train stays with you for weeks and changes the tone of your messages. You write more readily, with more images and fewer arguments; you listen more in conversations, and people confide in you. The questions that keep returning are modest but stubborn: who in my circle makes me want to be more sensitive? What idea has been crossing my mind for months without my giving it a place? What if I accepted that slightly offbeat invitation?

What this sextile asks for is a concrete yes to whatever inspires you: signing up for the class a friend mentioned, answering the person who suggests writing together, noting down the images that cross your mind. Neptune opens the window; you are the one who climbs through it. The risk is quiet and real: two years of pleasant inspirations evaporating without a trace, or the idealization of a circle, of a brilliant friend whose style you adopt instead of refining your own. The gift, for those who move, is a presence enriched without any jolt: a sensitivity you own in public, friendships that speak the language of the soul, and a way of approaching people that blends intuition with curiosity.

With a one-degree orb, the sextile lasts about two years, Neptune advancing two degrees a year and turning retrograde five months out of twelve: three contacts most often, five when the loop lingers. The first makes you notice a face or an idea; the retrograde brings Neptune back and lets you see whether the urge persists; the last one fixes what you have made your own. Over the 165-year cycle, the two sextile points to the Ascendant sit a hundred and twenty degrees apart: one arrives from the 3rd house, a little under thirty years after the conjunction, the other from the 11th house, a long time before the next one; depending on where Neptune sits in your birth chart, you will meet one of them, sometimes both.

To check, count two signs before or after the sign of your Ascendant: if Neptune is there, at the same degree give or take a degree or two, the window is open. The free birth chart on the site gives you that degree, as long as you enter a reliable birth time; the sky-of-the-day page shows where Neptune is, and whether it sits on the side of the 11th house or the 3rd tells you where the inspiration is coming from.