by April Elliott Kent
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.
© 2007 April Elliott Kent
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