Eclipse seasons come every six months, and can be seen as a regular, destabilizing power surge that runs through one of the most basic rhythms we live by–the lunar cycle. The Moon and Sun come together or stand across from one another to make an eclipse, and they are both symbols of the human body, the personality, the personal experience. Increasingly, I don’t think eclipses are about making predictions about what will happen to us as much as they are a time of heightened experience, or a time when your participation in life is being demanded. It’s a good time to listen and go with it, and maybe not a great time to try to predict anything! And, well, experiencing and participating in life as it is is not what humans excel at. We tend to see and participate in our lives as we are, projecting and transmitting our inner experience all over the place, trying to make ourselves feel safe by forcing our lives to look like what we believe life to be.
This eclipse season features the first eclipse in Aries on the 19th, and the very last eclipse in Scorpio for a few years on May 5th. Both Scorpio and Aries are ruled by Mars, so there will be martial themes like assertion, conflict, physicality, taking action, strategy, and effort. Where Mars is in the sky right now is therefore important, and Mars is not at his best playing defense in the nurturing womb of Cancer. This capacity all of us have to defend and protect what we think is going on instead of listening to what is actually happening and what is really being asked of us is likely to be heightened.
So perhaps instead of playing with fun horoscopes, or suggesting ways to be your best self at a time when that doesn’t look like it’s the point, it is more helpful to keep in mind that every spiritual path has a way of talking about the way you are already whole. Your absolute worthiness. Your perfection. Your buddha nature. The grace of your very existence, as opposed to your behavior. No evolved, loving spiritual path is going to demand that you perfect yourself so that you can earn grace. Grace is a gift! It is only through suffering and fucking up and falling that you receive grace. It is only in failure that you find that god, or the ensouled universe, or whatever you need to call this Great Love, is unconditional in its love for you.
Maybe the thing to pray for this eclipse season is simply to be able to see our defensiveness, our protectiveness, our inability. To own that we tend to see the world as we are, and not as it is. And maybe then we can pray for the courage to participate anyway, for it is in that recognition that the point of life is not to do it right–it is just to do it! That is where we will find grace.