Time to Tell the Truth

11.17.03


These recent days have been dense with the thick air of letting go.

It's an unavoidable step on the way to ascension, salvation or whatever other boldly titled level of increased enlightenment one seeks to reach. It's also a huge heaving sigh, even when seemingly drowned out by a torrent of cleansing tears, that the end of a long stalemate of indecision or inaction is finally here. Expansion. Release.

Letting go is what's symbolically called for at lunar eclipse, when, after months of allowing ignorance to impersonate bliss onstage, the strange eclipsed-full-moon light shows us what's really up. Two weeks ago, everyone was talking about the Harmonic Concordance, a lunar eclipse included within a six-pointed star arrangement of planets, as if its supposed "opening of an energetic 'stargate' to the Ascension of Mother Earth" [quoted from the Concordance homepage] was simply a matter of leaving the back door open.

Alas, letting go is not that neat and pleasant a process, despite whatever optimistic language we couch it in. It requires that we dredge up the buried truths, perhaps even reliving some of their affiliated pain. Thus, while the result is an overwhelmingly positive one in the end, the actual act is not all peace and love.

We are in the final waning quarter of this moon cycle, between the lunar eclipse of Nov. 8 and the upcoming solar eclipse (i.e., super-powered New Moon) this Sunday, and in this last quarter, we face the crisis of adjusting our consciousness to meet the changes in our reality since the last New Moon. This is, in a sense, our planting the seeds of seed-planting—in other words, preparation work in advance of making new beginnings. Extending the horticultural metaphor, this situates us in a period of tilling the soil, digging deep, pulling out rocks and dead roots which could block the future growth.

This metaphor also neatly corresponds to the transition between the signs of Scorpio and Sagittarius, the Sun making this move this week. Scorpio is all about going deep underground, delving way into the darkest and most intense parts of the psyche in order to produce a profound understanding of interpersonal dynamics. Sagittarius, the archer, boldly emerges from this underground, shooting straight to the sky with the holistic conclusions it draws from having been through the Scorpio experience. Sagittarius has adventures to partake in, extraordinary new perspectives to meet and mingle with, all contributing to the ultimate development of a coherent system of higher meaning. From the exceedingly important transformational chasm of Scorpio rises our sense of right and wrong, justice and ethical wisdom, as symbolized by Sagittarius.

Whether what follows in this paragraph is a tangent or not is up to you to decide, but I couldn't help but be struck by the peculiar concentration of developments in a certain type of tabloid/news hybrid story during this in-between-eclipses period. On Nov 9, American viewers were treated to a made-for-TV-movie war between (1) the story of returned-home-safely teenage kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart and (2) the story of returned-home-safely US military prisoner-of-war Jessica Lynch. Elizabeth won. Jessica went on record calling herself a pawn of the Pentagon. On Nov 12, a no-one-wins stalemate was called in the legal battle between Rosie O'Donnell and the publisher of the magazine that once bore her name. By Nov 13, sports star Kobe Bryant was making his first appearance in the court where he will face rape charges. All the while, the preliminary hearing in the Scott Peterson case, where he's accused of murdering his wife Laci and their unborn child, continued. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this bumper-crop of tantalizingly tabloid news, except that they are all American media parables, stories hyped way out of proportion because they play out moral lessons (a la Sagittarius) for our imagined edification. And though these stories have been floating around the public consciousness for months, they all seemed to reach some significant climax point during this eclipse moment. Interesting indeed…

Sunday's solar eclipse falls near the beginning of Sagittarius, joined in this sign by Mercury, Pluto and Venus. Sag is the truth-teller—but as we learned from Jessica and Kobe and Scott and the others, everyone's got their own truth. The past two weeks of letting go helped us to realize that some of our own truths may not serve us. Perhaps they've been inherited from others, occupied due to fear, or mimicked from the media. The conjoined Sun and Moon of the eclipse make a square to Uranus, back in Aquarius for its final few weeks, pointing us toward whatever vestiges of these former truths must be jolted loose and left to fall. Meanwhile, thanks to Mercury and Pluto's t-square to both Mars and Jupiter, we can expect that, as we speak our truths from the heart, we might discover how quick and sharp and deep our words hit—and how, judging from some of the disagreeable reactions we get, we might have missed some of the important details in our rush for declaration.

Though the Concordance got all the press, this succeeding solar eclipse holds the potential to actually build new systems of understanding—whether collectively or in our own lives—upon all the energy that's been released. To observe Sunday's solar eclipse, I recommend a conscious ceremony of reprioritizing, sitting with yourself for an hour or so and explicitly deciding which activities, projects, people, etc. are the most important to you at this specific moment in time. Seeing a holistic picture of the multiple facets of your life will help put into perspective which things actually deserve your stress and which are distractions from more relevant matters at hand.