The practical
considerations of everyday life have a way of distracting
us from life's natural cycles - even those of our own bodies.
For years, it's my husband who has alerted me to peak moments
in my monthly hormonal cycle. Every now and then, after listening
patiently while I unleash a vitriolic tirade about something
utterly trivial, he'll carefully ask, "Sweetie, are you…
premenstrual?" And since he's not typically the kind
of guy to dismiss a woman's righteous indignation as hysteria,
I'll stop, glance at the calendar and sheepishly realize that
- oh yeah. Hormone time!
Similarly,
eclipses come along every six months like clockwork,
and yet I tend to forget they're coming. A professional astrologer,
with eyes fixed doggedly on today's transits, or the next
New or Full Moon, or wedding dates for a client who's getting
married sometime next year, can become as shortsighted as
anyone else. Until one day something sets me off, and before
I know it I'm dashing off a nasty email or getting into a
stupid argument with someone I care about. And it's only then,
as I lunge for my trusty Pocket Astrologer to find the planetary
prompt for my outburst, that I sheepishly recall… oh
yeah. Eclipse time!
Oh yeah.
Eclipses. They rattle us because they remind us where
the bones are buried. They haunt our sensitive spots and tap
on the trick knees of our psyches with the tiny ball peen
hammer of fate until eventually - reflexively - we shoot right
through the ceiling.
Astrological
Earthquakes
Reared
in Southern California, I've always found earthquakes to be
a particularly useful metaphor for the astrology of eclipses.
Like little astrological earthquakes, eclipses are moments
when astrological pressure reveals your personal "fault
lines," where tectonic plates of emotion that may have
laid dormant for years bang and scrape against one another,
causing tremors that reverberate throughout your life. We
all have at least six such fault lines running through our
charts, along the polarities that connect opposing signs to
one another. And as the lunar nodes and eclipses dance along
these axes for a year or two at a time, one of these fault
lines in your chart becomes active and the ground beneath
your feet begins to shake - and the seismic waves are felt
far and wide.
This
month brings us the latest in a series of eclipses along the
Virgo/Pisces polarity that began last year and will
conclude in early 2008. The Virgo/Pisces fault line is where
the mighty plates of belief and rationale meet in a
battle for tectonic supremacy; where order and chaos
thumb-wrestle for the right to call your soul their own; where
sarcasm and childlike sweetness collide like unlikely
lovers in a sassy romantic comedy. And where two warring concepts
of perfection emerge: the Virgo version, in which perfection
equals having a place for everything, and everything in its
place; and the Piscean vision, which defines perfection as
a natural state of affairs, with everything perfect just as
it is.
A
crisis of faith
Unlike
real earthquakes, though, eclipses are predictable; and the
chart for the March 3 Lunar Eclipse, with the Sun and Moon
both in close aspect to startling Uranus and philosophical
Jupiter, promises a good-sized astrological temblor. Prepare
for the gentle, spiritual, compassionate side of your nature
to experience a rude awakening; in what, or in whom, have
you misplaced your faith? If you've been struggling to
retain a rosy, idealistic view of something in your life that
is in fact godawful, then prepare for Toto to pull back the
curtain and remind you that the great and powerful Wizard
of Oz is nothing more than a little man grasping at levers.
Thank
goodness for the Full Moon in Virgo, the little voice inside
that tried to tell you all along that the Wizard was too good
to be true. It's not that Virgo doesn't believe in goodness;
it's just that Virgo doesn't consider goodness one of human
nature's default settings. Virgo believes that we can be good
people, but that we have to work at it; that the world could
be a beautiful place, but not without a bit of elbow grease
and a spritz of Windex. It's not a terribly romantic world
view, but the calm, rational, pragmatic Virgo side of your
nature will keep you grounded in the days ahead - even if
that ground is a little shaky.
Take
a personal seismic history
Like
real earthquake faults, the eclipse "fault lines"
in your chart have distinctive characteristics. The key to
understanding this month's eclipses lies in finding where
these signs express themselves in your birth chart, and looking
back at past "quakes" along the same fault line.
What was happening in your life in 2002/2003, 1997/98,
1993, 1988? These are recent years when eclipses made
strong aspects to the Virgo/Pisces fault line in your chart.
The advantage
to understanding eclipse cycles in your chart is the same
as understanding active earthquake fault lines: you can't
necessarily avoid future shakes, but you can learn how to
build stronger and more flexible structures that will withstand
them. So mark your calendar with a big "E" for eclipse,
and plan on taking a little time-out if you find yourself
getting rattled. Let this eclipse season show you where the
infrastructure of your life is wobbly… and set the wise
Moon in Virgo to work, retrofitting your walls and shoring
up your foundation.
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