Eclipses as the Cracks that Let the Light Get in
On navigating the Aries-Libra axis and the deep healing potential of the next few weeks
Here we are in the grips of an eclipse season like no other. I am writing this just about 12 hours before the penumbral Lunar Eclipse at 5 degrees of Libra, exact at 3 am ET on Monday morning. Everyone I know is exhausted and on edge, equally anxious and depleted. But if this entire eclipse season is an iceberg, tonight’s lunar eclipse is just the tip.
Why is this an eclipse season like no other? Too many reasons, but I’ll list a few. Because it comes in concert with Mercury Retrograde in Aries (beginning on April 1st), which is co-present with the Sun and the profoundly powerful Total Solar Eclipse on April 8th. Because of the other big celestial events in April, like the heavy Mars-Saturn conjunction and the explosive Jupiter-Uranus conjunction later in the month. And possibly because of a comet named 12P/Pons–Brooks, nicknamed “the Devil Comet” that will be visible in the path of the Solar Eclipse across the USA. Neither astronomers nor astrologers have a lot of insight into this comet, as it only visits us every 71 years.
But this eclipse season is like no other mostly because it’s the follow-up to the one that we lived through last fall, so it speaks directly to the anguish unleashed into our collective six months ago. I’m thinking of our next few weeks as a cosmic wellness check, a moment of unpeeling and healing. This eclipse season might finally allow us to process our grief about what erupted in October, during the previous (and cyclically intertwined) eclipse season.
Six months ago, a week before the Solar Eclipse in Libra on October 14th, the world changed. Tonight’s eclipse is the release point for that moment. For many of us, our personal lives and relationships changed. Humans weren’t meant to carry so much grief, and yet we have had to. Even if we have lived our lives as “normal” that grief went somewhere in our bodies.
Ask yourself: what still hurts? What hurt did I never acknowledge and thus buried under the armor of survival? What traumas from years or decades ago were opened last fall? What ancestral trauma was activated and continues to flare hot and red?
Next week I’ll write more about the exceptional healing potential of the Aries eclipse that is exactly conjunct Chiron. The outpouring of pain leading up to that eclipse could be overwhelming, allowing us to finally unclench and remember that grief is not a linear process, so even if we are weeping, it doesn’t mean we are broken. This might just mean the news commemorates the six-month mark of the war, reminding us of its unceasing horrors. If we finally get a ceasefire, it is okay to cry like a child, knowing all that happened that our prayers could not prevent.
Eclipses can bring sudden, unexpected crisis, but we can look at them like Leonard Cohen looked at the cracks in everything — just as way to let the light shine in.
Libra is the relationship sign: its natal placements crave the balance of equal partnership but rarely achieve it. Those scales are almost always tipping, and when we experience a Full Moon in Libra (a lunar eclipse is a full moon shadowed by the earth, and considered ultra-powerful by astrologers) the archetype of the “other half” is activated. No matter what kind of relationship structure we prefer (if any): monogamous, open, poly, or something else, this eclipse can test our boundaries and our commitments. It can make us long to be seen and recognized for who we truly are, not the projection that our partners formed of us when we met.
If you’ve felt dizzy this past week, sensed your most toxic attachment patterns coming to the fore, wondered if you are beautiful enough to be loved — you are in the throes of this Libra eclipse energy. As a Libra rising with my Sun in Aries, I am right there with you!
Tonight’s eclipse could be emotionally taxing for relationships but also freeing — it’s that moment when you might want to scream CO-DEPENDENT NO MORE! But after you yell into the void and let it all go, you might genuinely feel lighter. When love is built on anxious attachment to fill what we perceive to be a void within, it will eventually stop feeding us those sensations we thought we craved. This can bring a breakthrough with a lover, or one that distills whether we want to be in a relationship at all. Six months ago some kind of love story began, and tonight is the denouement that will shake out over the next few weeks.
The position of the Sun in early Aries is also a reminder to blaze, to spark, to initiate, to begin, or to begin again — even if we got nowhere the last time we tried to strike the match and light up the cold, vast dark. It is spring, a season with a transition that often feels shocking and violent — and April will soon come like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Emma Stone’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Bella Baxter in Poor Things got me thinking about the tightrope those of us in marginalized bodies walk, and how that tightrope pulls tautly between the archetypes of Aries and Libra, so fraught and exposed and loud during the eclipse season portal we’re in now.
Bella, as herself, is the Aries archetype — all animal body and energy and discovery and desire and pure sex without affectation. Bella, as the men in her life (including her father and her lovers and society at large) see her, is Libra potential, all loveliness and performative prettiness and good manners and beauty on a pedestal and the “good girl” they long to present to their social set. Beautiful and unthreatening, someone they can control. But Bella refuses to be that.
This eclipse season, you can honor and hold both sides of the Aries-Libra axis by living fully and freely in your animal body, and knowing that even if this feels ugly or threatening to others — you are beautiful and deserve love. Because this is a Venus-ruled eclipse, and the next eclipse is a Mars-ruled eclipse, there is tension around the subject of pleasure and desire. Explore both with passion.
Housekeeping note: I am traveling this week and preparing to record my audiobook for Sex and Your Stars, so I may be a tiny bit late with your April forecast. Please forgive me, as I am in the headwinds of both eclipses and it’s A LOT.
Political addendum: if you don’t follow me on Twitter, you may have missed my posts about Trump’s transits vis-a-vis this eclipse: they are GNARLY. What jumped out when I looked at his chart earlier in the winter was that the Libra eclipse is not only in his second house of money, but exactly conjunct his Neptune. It was originally the day his first criminal trial was supposed to start, and I texted to a friend: “It looks like all his assets get washed away.” Note that this Neptune in the 2nd is part of how he’s fooled so many people into believing he’s a successful businessman, when all he’s ever been is a silver spoon grifter who declares bankruptcy and refuses to pay his workers.
Anyway, all this was before Tish James scheduled the literal eclipse as the deadline to PAY THE FUCK UP! I hope this fascist bitch-ass racist/rapist baby man has to pay, and I hope it HURTS his tiny, shriveled, nonexistent heart. And that he goes to jail and never becomes president again. VOTE.