Notes from the Eclipse Trenches

3.4.07


It's one thing to gaze ahead at astrology on the calendar for next week or next month… and to posit how it might transpire in our lives.

It's another thing altogether to pause while it's happening… and describe what we're actually seeing.

From where I stand, the past week or two—a span well within the orb of yesterday's lunar eclipse, and the solar eclipse coming up on Mar 18—has yielded up a distinct mound of old, unresolved emotional residue, resurrected from the past and thrust comfortably back into the present.

'Wasn't this stuff already done and put to bed?' we might be asking ourselves, as we confront habitual behaviors we thought we'd squashed… as we feel just as angry or sad or self-righteous as ever toward our former-friends and longlost-exes we thought we'd moved past… as we find the issues we thought we'd worked through, at home or on the job or in our love-life, crop back up from some new angle we hadn't considered before… and here we are again.

It's not surprising to remind ourselves this Virgo lunar eclipse occurred in conjunction with the Moon's South Node… an astro-point intimately linked to karmic leftovers from days gone by. It's these connections to the lunar Nodes—two points, always opposed to one another, which esoterically symbolize the spiritual life-path movement from past to future—that transform a typical New or Full Moon into an eclipse.

Thus, at a lunar eclipse (where what's been repressed from our usual conscious-level awareness seeps out) that's conjoined to the South Node, we host the regurgitation of half-chewed-experience (and its corresponding bile) back onto our plates… in hopes we can finally digest these last bits and successfully pass them through our system. This is the reason why it's all coming back now.

With Virgo as our inspiration, the pathway leading to release is an analytic one. As we face recurrences of anguish or upheaval—in fresh chunks meaty enough to be virtually impossible to ignore, thanks to a Jupiter square—we must reinterpret their significance to us, using more precise terms and more sharply-defined lines, so the stories we've been telling ourselves become that much more accurate and less misleading in their sentimentality. This 'reinterpretation' theme is reinforced by the fact of Mercury still being retrograde, having reentered intellectual Aquarius from the leakier domain of Pisces.

While the past hangs heavily over us, we cannot contain it, as long as we leave it undifferentiated in a lumpy mess called 'ancient history'. It runs slipshod over our hearts.

But the liberation from it, oddly enough, comes from managing the details. Like any good Virgo, we need to place the historical fine-points in their proper places… not to repress the pain, but to accurately affix it to its actual trigger. That way, should we feel it again, we can go back into the painstakingly reorganized memory-banks and remind ourselves where it came from in the first place.

We then gain mental power over the emotional journey from there to here… and consequently free ourselves up to try something radically different in the future, signified poignantly by the North Node's current conjunction to Uranus.

The same, therefore, isn't necessarily the same—if we dare to recategorize it appropriately.