In Beauty, It is Ended

Full moon lunar eclipse at 5° of Libra

Painting by Nata Sin

At 12:00am PST, the exact point, the hinge, between Sunday and Monday, the full moon will pass in to the shadow of the earth, giving us a partial lunar eclipse at 5° of Libra. Libra is the cosmic archetype of Justice and Harmony and Beauty and synthesizers, represented by the golden scales of balance. She is ruled by Venus, the goddess of love and beauty and relationship, but she is symbolic kin to Apollo, god of music and poetry, knowledge and prophecy, enlightenment and the higher, solar Self—the highest possibility who we could be and become, only to be achieved through right relationship. And that’s the easiest way to sum up Libra’s vast territories—it’s about relationship dynamics and their utopian ideal.

Wherever Libra rules your chart, this may be the part of you that comes most alive when you have others to vibe with and be witnessed and reflected by. It might be where you’ve experienced a talent for making things easy for other people, for smoothing a social field, or for being a natural diplomat. It also might be the part of you most sensitive to insensitivity and conflict; to anything harsh, discordant, or rude; to the telling of unvarnished truths. On a normal full moon in Libra, we would be acknowledging how we’ve grown in our capacity for love and relationship, celebrating any growth or blossoming and completion here, and working with a current of liberation just beginning, whose aim it is to free us from an old form. We would also likely be noticing rising tensions wherever our personal desires and instincts for autonomy (sun in Aries) conflict with our practical and emotional needs to be in solid, harmonious connection with others (moon in Libra).

Of course this is not a full moon, but an eclipse. The south lunar node moved into Libra last summer, and south nodes bring a kind of passive or unconscious emptying out and releasing—like a full moon current of liberation but much, much stronger. This signaled a time when we would no longer be able to easily and unthinkingly put others first, and where more splitting and conflict would be likely. The first Libra eclipse in this series was a new moon/solar eclipse on October 14th. The week before, as its transformational vortex opened, so did an outbreak of violence and war between Hamas and Israel over the occupation of Palestine, telling us exactly what time it was in the collective. Without oversimplifying that or any other conflict in the world, we can say that one of the shadows of Libra is absolutely the masking of abuse with niceness and civility and professions of care; the hiding and enabling of dark deeds with political diplomacy. This kind of vortex was likely to inflame any place where our peace-making efforts had become passive and avoidant; any where we had allowed ourselves and our leaders to look away from injustice, power and resource imbalances, and the pain and trauma of poverty and caste systems. Unattended, patterns of oppression only deepen and become crueler; any apparent peace is extremely fragile. My piece for that first eclipse—Shadow Work, or How to Stay Believing in the Possibility of Peace—might be worth reading or rereading, if you have an impulse to. I have temporarily lowered the paywall on that one, because we need all the help we can get right now.

On a personal level, these south node Libra eclipses have been asking us to see clearly where our relationship dynamics have been unhealthy and unequitable; where there’s been no reciprocity. Again, this began last summer, July 17th, 2023 to be exact—and the nodes will be in Aries/Libra until January 11th, 2025. If you’ve historically been a submissive, conflict-avoidant, codependent people pleaser, even if you’ve cleaned that shit up, this has probably resurfaced your awareness of those tendencies in you. You’ve likely been invited to look or look again at where those instincts come from, and whether and how they are still unconsciously running the show. Greater consiousness is our only hope, because early/old relational patterns and their supporting neural networks never fully go away. Situations and symptoms of suffering may be asking you to re-examine your own needs and boundaries. You may be questioning whether your helping of others is really helping them, or whether it is subtly or unsubtly disempowering them. You might be being given the chance to step back, and let others do more.

If instead, you’ve historically been on the other side of this dynamic; if you’ve received a great deal from people who seem to easily give and give, if you’ve been unconsciously dependent on their attunement and care and labor without giving back in equal measure; this period of time has been a different kind of wake up call. Enablers in your life may have stopped enabling you, or be signaling that the end is very near. Even if you’ve largely cleaned that up in your life, situations may be requiring a fresh look at that pattern, and some deeper integrity checks. This clearing of any unhealthy patterns is making room for a coming upgrade to our personal power. But that can only happen if we become completely aware of these old dynamics and ways and stories, commit to seeing them for what they are, and letting them go in favor of scary/exciting new experiments in agency, love, and partnership.

This next active chapter of that transformational vortex opened a week ago. It will last through I’m guessing March 31st, when the energies will shift toward the total solar eclipse in Aries coming April 8th. As a reminder, eclipse seasons are times to pause all forceful effort and hold our ego’s agenda very lightly. They are times to just notice what is evolving or resolving, what’s emerging in the outer world and in your inner life. Most witches and wizards I know avoid using their powers or conducting rituals during eclipse seasons, partly because the power sources of the Sun and Moon are unstable, and partly because it just isn’t needed. The cosmos is already conducting its own healing/manifesting ceremony, and we can just lean into it, and surrender to the forces that are larger and wiser than us. If you’ve experienced a big healing brewing around any of this eclipse’s themes, it is likely coming to a head in the next week. We will have one more Libra eclipse this round, a solar eclipse on October 5th, and so we can also expect one last activation of these themes and energies.

Without knowing specifically how this is hitting you, if at all, I suspect that the thing that will help right now, if help is needed, is a reconnection with the higher octave of Venus—with the powers of the heart, and love, and the beauty way. Just keep asking yourself, what would Love do? What would Beauty do? We can set boundaries and hold ourselves and others accountable firmly but lovingly, remembering that our hearts are good, our insides are good, even when we are acting out or causing harm with our unconsciousness. While violence may sometimes be necessary to stop violence, we can keep calling on the better angels in our nature, believing in each other’s humanity and the possibility of awakening. We can encourage each other in this healing and coming correct, while refusing to do anyone else’s work for them. We can notice and reinforce all good faith efforts at right relationship. The Navajo/Diné have a traditional prayer, known as the Beauty Way prayer. I’ve probably written about it before, because it’s most of the most powerful prayers there is. It’s a deceptively simple prayer about living in a way that invokes beauty, but I’ve also found that it invokes a kind of moral endurance. It reminds us that our task is to seek goodness and love and and beauty and peace everywhere by seeing it and recognizing it and being it and creating more of it. There are many translations, and here are a few. If you don’t already know it by heart, you might want to print it, fold it up in your pocket, and keep it with you for the duration of this season. See what changes inside of you and outside of you.

May I walk.

May it be beautiful.

May it be beautiful before me.

May it be beautiful behind me.

May it be beautiful to the right of me.

May it be beautiful to the left of me.

May it be beautiful above me.

May it be beautiful below me.

May it be beautiful all around me.

May it be beautiful inside of me.

May I walk. May it be beautiful.

In beauty, it is ended.

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Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what sounds good to you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit.)

*There will be no ritual prompts during eclipse season, please consider laying low on wielding the sword of you personal will. I am instead sharing a simple somatic practice for re-bonding with gravity during ungrounded times, and a creative writing prompt, born out of this Libra eclipse’s themes.