The Hidden Wholeness in All Things

Full moon lunar eclipse at 5° of Taurus

Twenty-years-ago Mount Fuji of Japan, properly named Fuji-yama, the “never-dying mountain,” photographed from the sea by Asako Narahashi

Saturday at 1:24pm PST, the full moon will pass in to the shadow of the earth, giving us a partial lunar eclipse at 5° of Taurus, an answer to the solar eclipse two weeks ago. Most of this eclipse will not be visible from the United States - it will be below the horizon for us - but its effects will still be felt. This is the final eclipse in Taurus, which hosted the north node for the last two years, so something is coming to a close. It’s like we’ve had this part of us cracked open and resensitized, given new hungers and needs, given new nutrients, and that emphasis is ending. Now, Jupiter is only mid-way through its yearlong transit of Taurus, bringing its expansive resourcing and yes-ands, and Uranus is still mid-transit (2018-2026), still trying to revolutionize outmoded stories. So this doesn’t feel like the dramatic conclusion, but still a rather significant culmination, followed by a release of some of the tension and attention that’s been building and holding here. If you know the part of your chart and life that Taurus leads, close your eyes, climb into your imagination time machine, and think back to what your life was like two years ago. Try to remember what your biggest fears and dreams were here. Now crack your eyes open to the present, and take in what’s changed.

We are also entering the time of the year where we honor the dead and the unseen world, everything that’s at home in the dark, and this eclipse also feels very connected to that. Grief portals. Ancestral memories. Old selves. Hidden spirits. The way everything is invisibly interconnected, becoming visible only when we turn up the earth, or brave another underworld journey, or face some sudden eruption from the personal or collective unconscious. The Sabian symbol for 5° of Taurus is “a widow at an open grave,” so this is a coming to terms with loss, maybe a specific one, but I’m guessing it’s bigger and more complicated than that. The material sensual world really matters to Taurus, and secure attachment is a big part of its work. But achievements and possessions really are fleeting. Alliances and bodies and even fiercely held beliefs fall apart. Everything that wants to endure must change form. We have to know how to let go when it is time to let go. As much as Taurus represents the spirit of springtime and rebirth and the nurturing and stabilizing of new form, it’s current of manifestation always matures this time of year, when Scorpio is presiding over our deepening emotional descent and hosting funerals for what’s dying away. It’s like Taurus only knows itself fully when the great waters of heartbreak and crisis come to test its ground of being, its trust in process.

Maybe a moment will naturally arrive in the coming days that feels a little like this standing at the grave of all that has come before, or like a confrontation with the fragile, ephemeral nature of things. Maybe a destabilizing wave of feeling will move through you. If this were a regular full moon, Taurus would help you plant your feet, connect with the earth and the Great Mother, and ground through the wave of feelings and change. Since it’s an eclipse, we’ll see. Some many are losing their religion right now, and for good reason; we may not be spared. Let’s all just try not to be alarmed by how human and vulnerable we are, how little we can control. We need to find a way to honor what’s happening and changing, and to feel whatever we feel about it, to accompany ourselves and each other through the latest shocks. Venus is the ruler of these eclipses, so compassion and beauty and care are compasses we can turn to when the world spins. I’m oscillating between weeping for the world, and also just really loving the world so much; my optimism is relentless. We cannot conquer evil, but evil cannot conquer goodness and love, either. Toasts keep rising up. Here’s to our willingness to feel any of this! Here’s to how much we miss all that old shit! Here’s to the silliness and humility and joy that washes into the places we’ve allowed to be hallowed and hollowed by grief! Any day now!

I’ve seen several people post this Toni Morrison interview clip in the last week, trying to fill the wisdom vacuum that war and violence creates. In it, she’s sagely explaining the harsh truth, that, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about the solution.” I love that she uses the encouraging word grandeur, like there are two kinds of fools, and if we are striving, trying, even if we are failing, we are choosing to be the Great kind. And she’s right about solutions not being the point. This Pema Chödrön quote has also been making the rounds: “Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. The come together again, and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” I like remembering this, too: I am a room for life, and I can make room.

Taurus is always asking us, in some way, to recover from short-sightedness, from identifying too closely with the part of us and the part of life we happen to be in now. It’s reminding us of “the hidden wholeness in all things,” as Parker Palmer puts it. Being whole also always means something other than being unbroken. Wholeness is a story we can tell ourselves that draws everything into it. In this story, we can feel shattered by the loss of what was once here and once a part of us, but also discover and tend the new shape this brokenness creates. Wholeness isn’t whole if it does not include all we remember and all we forget; all of our scars and ghost limbs and past lives and future selves; all our vulnerabilities and strengths; all the best of us and the worst of us at once, plus something always mysteriously gathering from the wreckage to be reborn. This is where Taurus’s wisdom can still fasten us in, even in an eclipse—this gospel of wholeness and root systems and entanglement.

Imagine that all of life, everything you can see and touch, is like the front side of some beautiful, intricate embroidery. And if you could just turn it over, you would see this messy tangle of threads. That’s us. We are not emerging from lines or isolated lineages. We have always emerged from and been supported by an impossibly complex network of mothers, fathers, aunts, brothers, friends, strangers, trees, birds, bees, bacteria, stones, and lakes. My ancestors include the soil my grandmother’s food grew in, and the volcanoes and ice caves on other sides of the earth from where I was born and now stand. They include the 25-feet-tall mushrooms that used to tower over the earth instead of the trees. Cultures and systems based on linearities and hierarchies and clear categories strain and fracture under this kind of chaos and complexity. Seeing the world like this erodes politically drawn maps and moral codes that were perfectly moral; it dissolves sidedness. It’s trying to draw us back down into a direct and reverential relationship with whatever physical ground we are on.

In my long search for something that can hold this kind of complexity, I’ve come back over and over again to the moon, to the cosmic conversation about revolution and change she’s trying to translate for me, this conversation that the Earth is part of. That’s what I am doing here, letting something bigger than me speak to me by speaking through me, trying not to edit out any thing that feels even a little wise. With Jupiter and Venus at the wheel, I know it’s a bit much. But writing it, exposing my own inner workings and flaws in the process, forces me into wider consciousness, more intense participation in relationships, a larger stake in the world. I don’t know if it brings anyone else solace, but it brings me solace. Even when its challenging me. However you are working with events and energies right now, just know I’m out here, tangled up in it with you. Lay low if you can, be loving if you can, this eclipse season will pass.

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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 prompt for this eclipse, please continue to lay 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 of course a creative writing prompt, born out of this eclipse’s themes.