It’s 2018 and it’s eclipse season already

Your year may have started out with surprising new directions as suggested by the Uranus station on January 2. Maybe you felt rebellious – not wanting to go back to work after the holidays. The exact hit of Jupiter sextile Pluto of January 15 perhaps lent an opportunity to bring profitable things to light, but also effort required to make anything of them. Did you catch the big wave Mars-Jupiter conjunction and go into action January 6? Or did you just take on too much?

Now intensity has begun to build: every six months or so the orbits of the Sun, Moon and Earth align. Lunar and solar eclipses result producing celestial phenomena that can take one’s breath away in their strangeness if you are lucky enough to be able to see them.

Remember last summer’s big one? Millions viewed “The Great American Eclipse.” The chattering classes – those who talk for a living – had something other than Donald Trump to talk about although the video of him glancing up at it with his unprotected eyes – something we weren’t supposed to do! – made the rounds. The world had to see his reaction to it.

What’s suggested by the solar eclipse on February 15 is that the conditions of your life around the time of the Great American Eclipse may re-appear in a new form. Best use is to seed a new idea deep in your brain. Try digging into a subject that interests you.

The lunar eclipse coming sooner on January 31 suggests a time for toning down one’s extroverted ego expression and center in self-focus and discovery. This can best be done on your own; however, if you must involve one or more persons, assume a stance of real service to them.

This eclipse season is about our collective crisis of leadership. Lead yourself well through it and you’ll be fine.

As I always tell my students: eclipse seasons just feel intense but it’s largely drama, not trauma. Whether more “bad” things actually happen during eclipses is open to question. To the ancients, eclipses were bad omens because in their perfect understanding of the cosmos, there ought not to ever be any stain on the Sun or Moon. But today, most of us appreciate that as Leonard Cohen put it “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Maybe that applies to the heavens as well.

Eclipses can yield treasures, but they are deep. You have to hang onto your head enough to go deep to get them.