On this Eclipse (of the Heart), Care & Patience Are Essential
Every now and then I fall apart: A guided meditation
Every now and then I get a little bit lonely
And you're never coming 'round
(Turn around)
Every now and then I get a little bit tired
Of listening to the sound of my tears
(Turn around)
Every now and then I get a little bit nervous
That the best of all the years have gone by
(Turn around)
Every now and then I get a little bit terrified
And then I see the look in your eyes
(Turn around, bright eyes)
Every now and then I fall apart.
-Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart
The leaves are falling. The world around us certainly seems to be falling apart. I know I haven’t felt quite whole, as of late.
And the timing is impeccable: the second Eclipse Season of 2023 is upon us.
(Last night my friend noted: “Eclipse season? We didn’t have that when we were kids…” Eclipse season refers to the period of time (about 35 days) every six months when eclipses happen, visible from somewhere on Earth. An eclipse season is the only time when the Sun is close enough to one of the Moon's nodes to allow an eclipse to occur. They are regular, bi-annual intervals of fun, life-changing astrology. Hold on to your butts.)
Libra on my mind
Last eclipse season, in April and May, we had a solar eclipse in Aries and a lunar eclipse in Scorpio that both really packed a punch (at least in my personal experience). We start this season off with another solar eclipse: today, the moon in Libra blocked out the sun in Libra with a stunning Ring of Fire. This super-charged new moon delivered us themes of transformation in relationship, balancing me vs. we, and ideas of justice.
I write to you from Santa Fe, NM, which was in the direct path of this eclipse. There has been a lot of excitement around here, with cheap eclipse-viewing glasses sold out at every gas station and grocery store. I bought a couple of pairs and ended up glancing up at the sun a couple times during the course of it’s progression this morning, though I was feeling more aligned with the traditional Indigenous (Diné and others) wisdom of this area, which is to stay indoors, and take the time to go inward rather than gazing at the phenomenon as a spectacle.
Solar eclipses happen when the moon is in the direct path between the sun and the earth. The sun, representing consciousness and individual will, is blocked out temporarily by the moon, which represents the body and emotional intelligence. With this symbolism in mind, solar eclipses give us a distinct opportunity to go inward, to listen to our guts and our intuitions and hearts in parts of our life where brain-activity and mental processing may have been taking up too much space.
Eclipses act like clearing-houses, times of endings and new beginnings. The feeling is like the power is switched off in a room, and when it goes back on, all the furniture has been rearranged ever-so-slightly, and everything feels a little… different. The changes that eclipses bring to our lives can feel quite sudden and out of the blue. But oftentimes later we recognize that they were like ripping a band-aid off of something that was already mostly healed, mostly ready to be exposed.
In the solar season of late September/October-Libra season- it’s common to think about our relationships and partnerships as we head into the colder, darker winter months. But this eclipse means that we have no choice- if only for a brief moment in time- than to feel into the depths of relationships and partnerships with others, not just think about them. This Libra eclipse promises to bring in revelations and wild-cards in how we relate to others, in areas focused on justice, and in the parts of life where me-vs-we questions are taking center stage.
Libra is currently on the South Node of the moon, which is known as the Tail of the Dragon in Vedic Astrology. Eclipses on the South Node/Dragon’s Tail are all about digestion and release of old ways of being. (Eclipses on the North Node/Head of the Dragon, like the upcoming eclipse on October 28, are about revealing what we are hungry for). This Libra south node eclipse will reveal, in our bodies and our emotions, what patterns in relationship/partnership are no longer aligned with our truths.
Libra Mythology
Mythologically, Libra is a rather enigmatic sign to decipher. While most signs trace their archetypical stories back to Babylonian times or earlier, Libra as a sign representing balance and justice didn’t come into existence until Roman Times. Rome was said to be founded when the moon was in Libra, and they considered this auspicious.
‘Italy belongs to the Balance, her rightful sign. Beneath it Rome and her sovereignty of the world were founded’, wrote the Roman philosopher Manilius. In Rome, Libra was considered ‘the sign in which the seasons are balanced, and the hours of night and day match each other.’
Prior to Roman times, the sign between Virgo and Scorpio referred to a part of the much larger Scorpio constellation. Pre-Libra, this part of the sky was known as the claws of the Scorpion, or chelae. Libra was not known as a separate constellation, and chelae represented 30 degrees of the full 60-degree sign of Scorpio. The brightest stars in Libra are Alpha Librae, called Zubenelgenubi from the Arabic al-zubānā al-janūbī meaning ‘the southern claw’, and Beta Librae, or Zubeneschamali, from the Arabic al-zubānā al-shamālī, ‘the northern claw’.
But even in Babylonian times and before, since this season is in the time of year when there is equal day and equal night, it has always been associated with balance to some degree. Libra, as a time of year, as a sign, is about relationships between people. Libra is about justice, harmony, and equality. Surrounding this eclipse, those concepts are understandably on most everyone’s mind.
The question is: does justice act like the fierce pincers of the Scorpion- retribution, an eye for an eye? Or is justice more refined and humanized, like the ancient Romans would purport their Libran scales to be?
Scorpion’s claws: an eye for an eye…
(Trigger warning: the next sections include my thoughts on the current situation in Israel/Palestine, so if you’re burnt out with adding more to your personal processing of this, I give you full permission to skip it and take a break to care for yourself.)
"An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."
This phrase, along with the idea of written laws, goes back to ancient Mesopotamian culture that prospered long before the Bible was written or the civilizations of the Greeks or Romans were established. "An eye for an eye ..." is a paraphrase of Hammurabi's Code, a collection of 282 laws created by the Babylonian King who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C. The code is inscribed on an upright stone pillar which was discovered in 1901 in modern day Iran.
In Hammurabi’s code, some laws were quite brutal, some were more progressive, and none were Libran or egalitarian in their application. One law said, “If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out- whoever commits an injury should be punished in the same manner as that injury. However, this equal retribution only applied if the two sides were of equal social rank. If women or slaves were injured, the penalty was less. One law reads, “if a man strikes a free-born woman so that she loses her unborn child, he shall pay ten shekels for her loss.”
The phrasing of “an eye for an eye” was also used extensively in the Old Testament: “Anyone who kills an animal shall make restitution for it, life for life. Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered." Leviticus 24:18-20. However, the Talmud, which is the book of Jewish law which documents the evolution of Jewish legal and moral thinking over the centuries, can be interpreted that that the physical retaliation actually means monetary compensation for injury- which ultimately became the basis of modern-day civil law.
Has morality evolved since Hammurabi?
Since war was declared in the Middle East last week, the opinions of seemingly everyone with a social media account have been flying around like seething, polarizing wildfire. After the news of the Hamas attack on Israel hit the public, reactions were instantaneous, emotions that had been waiting for the moment to explode outward after being held at a lower frequency for months, years, decades, millenia.
At this moment, polarization and strong, unwavering stances seem to be the only reactions that are allowed to exist- anything that claims to look at both sides is instantly attacked for not giving enough weight to the other side. Someone mourning the horrific murders of Israelis is accused of not condemning Israel’s occupation and systemic takeover of Palestine enough. Someone pointing out the settler-colonial apartheid that Israel has perpetuated on Palestinians for decades is accused of having no empathy for the death and abduction of Israeli women and children.
I do believe that most of us are capable of much more nuance than what we’re seeing on social media and Fox News and beyond. A big piece underlying all this need for taking sides, I think, is the culture of polarization and propaganda that is perpetuated by world governments in their winner-takes-all play for geopolitical power - and the biased media outlets that work in tandem with said governments. This includes the sides that are inherently taken when media and government and other public spokespeople use different language when referring to different groups of people, such as “the number dead” for Palestinians and “the number murdered” for Israelis.
The conditioning and bias that comes from those in power, from media and government and culturally-accepted language itself, makes many conscious-minded people feel like it is their responsibility to take to social media and remind everyone of historical atrocities that we may not fully understand, the underlying conditions and prejudices that we are not taught in school or by our families of origin. There is a pressurized need to speak out, so no one misses the complexity of this situation. And the media platforms that we all have in the palms of our hands will algorithmically push the most polarizing, the most actively incendiary, to the top of our feeds.
Oppression Causes Violence.
The most consistent truism that I keep seeing posted, especially from those in support of a free Palestine (including many Jews for a Free Palestine), is “Oppression Causes Violence”.
Whether the violence resulting from oppression is warranted, justifiable, or desired, isn’t the point to these posts, it seems. We are at a time in history, with enough perspective and enough understanding, that we are able to focus on the roots of actions, and many people are trying to see down to the root cause of this horrific war.
But with generations of atrocities that have been committed against both groups of people all sides feel oppressed. Studies on epigenetics have shown that we can carry the genetic memories of our recent ancestors, up until 14 generations before us- and I would argue that literally no one on either side of this war is free from oppression in either the current moment or the recent past. So, the acceptance of the idea that oppression causes violence cannot be the end of the story, or a justification for said violence, even though it is likely the truth.
With the heavily emotional eclipse season we’re currently in the middle of, those feelings of oppression are front and center. No one is going to win the battle, let alone the war, if we’re debating who has been oppressed the most- the most recently, the most consistently, the most over long periods of time- and expecting that to get us anywhere.
Zooming out and looking backward, both sides have innocent victims, both sides have governments with insular ideologies that won’t back down. Both sides are supported with extensive money and weapons by power-hungry nation states with terrifying nuclear capacities- the United States and Iran. And they have been for decades, since the formation of the current state of Israel . Both of these governments have vested interest in letting violence against civilians destabilize an area that is strategically placed on the globe for resource grabs and military defense.
In terms of how people are relating to the narrative and propaganda of these powers-that-be, one way of being that feels like it should be over, passe, finished these days is turning a blind eye/ drinking the kool-aid from governments and media that promise us false safety and security. But with so much content flying into the palm of our hands every moment, it is truly tough to fight against the propaganda wars, to know what’s “fake news”, what’s real, where it is coming from, and who’s behind it.
As the days go by beyond the initial declaration of war by Israel, as conditions are worsened by Israeli strikes in Gaza that are on the brink of Palestinian genocide, and as more and more innocent adults and children are murdered and held hostage by Hamas, the opinions on social media seem to be getting more nuanced and complex and detailed than the simple lines that were drawn a mere week ago. For that, I am grateful, but a lot of damage has already been done by the social media machine’s rampant reinforcement of binary propagandas.
“I stand with…”
Bayo Akomolafe wrote an interesting reflection piece yesterday about this conflict, titled The Lines That Whisper Us. Like me, he too was floored by the amount of polarized and definitive stances being taken with such haste. He did a search to see how the words “I stand with” were trending across the internet, and found that, worldwide, usage had skyrocketed dramatically (by 650%) with the topic of “Israel” accounting for the context with the most usage.
He writes, “There was something very stoic and ontologically secure – perhaps even morally impressive – about declarations of near-absolute positionality. The phrase “I stand” was brimming with such fierce indisputability, such metaphysical security, perhaps echoing the utter unspeakability of a war that had left everyone slack-jawed.”
What is happening IS utterly unspeakable.
Anecdotally, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a time in my life when I met and became friends with several people from Israel. I was living in China in 2006, and I met dozens of Israelis who were backpacking through Laos, Vietnam, and the area of rural China where I lived. Many of these young travelers had just finished up their 3 year mandatory military conscription in the Israeli army. Several were people who had found a way to get an exemption for mental health reasons, or dishonorably dropped out.
One friend I met was a little older than the typical 21 year old- he was in his late 20’s and he had served in the army for 6 years. He had decided to stay 3 years beyond his mandatory service because he himself had been rapidly promoted to higher positions of power.
He told me, with tears in his eyes, about the first-hand experiences of his almost-daily raids of family homes in Gaza and the West Bank. He told me the story of how he got to China: one pre-dawn morning as he stood over a sleeping Palestinian baby’s cradle with a semi-automatic rifle in hand, he had a moment of truth. He felt as if he was floating above his own head, seeing what he and the Israeli army were doing from a new perspective - the perspective of humanity, of innocent lives. The things he had done, the violence that he had committed prior to that day, he said, was not worthy of talking about. He left the army immediately, dishonorably, which led to his having to leave Israel. When I met him, he had been traveling in Asia for a year already, and had no plans to return to Israel.
I lost touch with him a while ago, but I’m thinking of him today, of how he must be feeling at a time like this. I think of all the people I know who feel the nuance in their bodies, the desire for this longstanding war to end. Most people I know understand that this is not a black/white issue, that within it is deep unfairness and deep contradiction. Like me, most don’t have answers, we only feel pain and want to do something to stop our pain, to stop pain of innocent people. But many feel compelled to speak on the issue and declare their hardline stance in order to be seen as supporting the right side of history as it unfolds. I get it. Time is of the essence.
If I must take a stab at taking a definitive stance:
I stand with the people of Israel.
I stand with the people of Palestine.
I do not stand with the actions, ideology or goals of the Israeli government, or any other government that uses force to occupy and colonize.
I do not stand with the actions, ideology, or goals of Hamas, or any other terrorist group that seeks to annihilate entire groups of people.
I do not stand with any global superpower that supports and enables genocide and violence through dollars and weapons and dehumanizing propaganda for their geopolitical gains.
I understand that to stand for “innocent people, everywhere”, can come across as apathetic, milquetoast, or not based in reality. The reality is, guns and bombs are actively being sent by supporting governments and organizations to one side or another. If our governments was acting out of love for who they ‘stand for’, they would be sending food, medical supplies, and aid, instead. It is all happening so fast, and so much is on the line. So I support rapid actions- the time is now. Please, go to the protests, call your senators, refuse to remain silent. Power to the fucking people. Let’s go.
From ideological devotion to a network of empowered individuals… (here’s hoping for the future)
The past couple of thousand years - the Age of Pisces - is known as an era when people willingly submitted themselves, immersed themselves, and devoted themselves to ideologies- to religion, to government, to the promise of something above that would protect them, no questions asked.
The coming age of Aquarius, which we are seeing hints of now, rejects this blind merging with spirit. Aquarius is about recognizing our individual sovereign place within the ecosystem, realizing networks and channels that can be carved out by sovereign individuals to connect resources for everyone. It’s about the power of the people in coming together for what we really want. Hopefully, we are collectively becoming less interested in the Piscean notion of selfless devotion to something larger, something above us and beyond us. Hopefully, we are collectively becoming interested in Aquarian ideals of humanitarianism, accessibility, and making sure all perspectives can be heard.
This is the energy that is backing the endless disputes in my Instagram feed. People don’t need more information; they know that oppression creates violence and ultimately, in most all cases, they don’t want oppression OR the resulting violence. Both Hamas and the Israeli government are oppressive to the people. Neither all Israelis or all Palestinians are in support of these oppressive regimes. Many people can see through the lies that any regime will tell to get you on their side, to support their cause, to keep them in power.
The world cannot go blind
"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind".
We all know the quote attributed to the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, describing nonviolence as a strategy for Indian resistance against the colonial British occupiers.
The quote can also be attributed, later, to Martin Luther King, who wrote in “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story” in 1958:
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.
I believe that most people today, deep down, don’t believe the only way of justice is the Babylonian era definition of eye-for-eye-tooth-for-tooth. Gandhi and MLK and others who have reminded us of the resulting blindness and toothlessness spoke the truth, despite how cliche the statement feels today.
Whether or not it is possible to convert, rather than annihilate, the opponent in this age-old war is up for debate. Many are pointing to both Hamas and the modern State of Israel and saying that they are beyond any hope of reconciliation other than violence and death. But on a personal level, I believe the only thing that is worth doing right now is to lean into Martin Luther King’s statement of morality and practicality. To lean into whatever solutions we can find in our hearts for a just future beyond these archaic, cruel, claw-like binaries.
Bayo Akomolafe’s ends his essay with the question:
“How do we process the grief? How do we pray, do we act, do we think, in ways that do not reproduce the conditions that nourish the dominant tendencies that have produced this war?”
We need new ways of responding. Yes, this situation is dire, urgent. And sooner than later, defensiveness and black-and-white thinking will melt into exhaustion, sadness, overwhelm. In this moment, when the energy is available, when you’re not able to sleep at night, think about your true personal definition of justice.
Think about where justice begins and ends, and if there would be any possible conditions of ‘fairness’ between sides that would not allow for the justification of violent extremism. Ask yourself if violence and loss of innocent lives are ever truly justified, or if they just continue to create conditions for more terrorism, more oppression, more violence… a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.
Because the truth is, your stance on justice itself is what matters the most right now. This is the stance that will determine right actions and right relationships in every individual case going forward.
Justice is not a static thing. What once were the scorpion’s claws later became the scales of balance. And who knows… maybe it’s not too late for a new symbol of equality, fairness, and humanity to be introduced. It’s up to the people. It’s up to us..
Thanks for reading. I didn’t go into this post about the new moon eclipse intending to write about this war, but it is impossible to separate any facet of life from thinking about it, feeling it, crying about it, wishing for answers. I already anticipate some backlash, some retaliation, some accusations of pacifism equaling complicity in one atrocity or another. I guess is kind of the point of writing, after all. I welcome discussion, and I believe that real, deep, heart-felt conversation is the best thing that is coming out of this newish phenomenon of insta-reporting
A Guided Meditation for the Libra Solar Eclipse
As with all my other posts that offer a somatic practice that aligns with the astrology transits and the themes of the current moon, I want to offer one today that feels right for the eclipse, and for this week of pure overwhelm with information and images and questions coming out of the evolving crisis.
If you’d like, I invite you to close your eyes and listen to this 7 minute fountain meditation below- it can be done anywhere, standing or sitting.
Fountain Meditation:
Extending so much love to you all on this time between eclipses. Be gentle and kind with yourselves over the next couple of weeks- the veil is thin, the portal is open. We’ll meet again on October 28th for a full moon lunar eclipse in Taurus.
Until then,
Cry.
Rest.
Sleep.
Feel your feelings.
Actively show care and patience for yourself and others.
Recognize that no one is being their ‘best self’ right now.
Smile at a stranger, help someone in need.
Give yourself a big hug.
Believe in love.
Peace,
AMD