Welcome to the grand finale of summer’s eclipse season. Many full moons bring a sense of ripeness or fruition, but this is something else: a culmination of emptying. As with any eclipse there are extremes; on one side, the patriarchal boss-mentality that steals away crucial parts of our humanity and tells stories about “needs” that are flattened and cold. On the other hand, there is wisdom in the stoic rejection of luxury isn’t there? What matters is the source. Who’s motives are you privileging? Who’s “no” matters? Where do you really come from?
This moment finds us noticing what is getting cleaned out or repaid or banished. In January, what did you learn that you’d have to let go of? Where is that process at now? Has it altered your status in your own ideas of hierarchy, or of society’s?
Eclipses in Saros Series 119 analyze relationship. This one bends away from mental gymnastics and forces us to deal with the hot and cold of feelings. Our circumstances place the emphasis on how we respond at a gut level and some version of the following questions have stayed with us along the way:
What debts do you owe and which ones will you pay? What is owed to you? Where do you trust yourself? How did you learn to define value? What haunts you? What does resilience look like when laws and structures harm and restrict, or how do we love in captivity?
How does death shape our relationships with the living? Are the structures we’re building respecting relationship as a need, a nourishment equal to water? How are you staying dutiful to family as well as committed to your roles in society?
How is gut response already shaped by fear and inertia? Can calm acceptance be helpful but also a loss of heart? How are you learning to navigate the contradictions between feeling and analyzing?
How is art, music, movement, and ritual bringing us together where words alone fail? How do we keep and hold space for what is too big to properly mourn alone?
Lunar eclipses show us the road ahead. This eclipse takes what we’ve learned about self and other; duty and blockages; family vs the rest of the world, and sends us on our way with our values stripped down to what truly matters.