March’s Eclipses: I Hate To See You Leave, But I Love to Watch You GROW
I know I’m not alone when I say this - I’m both thankful and f*ing ecstatic to see March done and over! With both a solar and lunar eclipse, we were all pushed to not only step out of our comfort zones, but to recognize them first. There’s so much talk about breaking restraints, freeing ourselves, smashing through the comfortable walls we’ve constructed, but before we can do that, we have to actually dig deep, recognize and truly acknowledge the source of these constructs. Why we strive towards certain ideologies and illusions of what security is, and how we’ve become trapped by the very structures we once applauded ourselves for solidifying.
Truth is, nothing is solid. Everything’s fluid. Everything goes through shifts - our relationships, our careers, our homes, even our dreams. Most of us exist outside of ourselves, meaning most of us haven’t given ourselves the time to actually know ourselves. We push and push out of duty and obligation and necessity, caught in this cycle of ‘doing’ and ‘producing’ and ‘progressing,’ but ask any one of us to sit still for a moment and answer the question, “Forgetting debt, forgetting responsibility, forgetting everything that tugs on you and pulls you in directions you’d rather not go, answer this: If you could fill your days doing what you love and have it provide for you, what would your days look like?,” how many of us could readily answer that? How many of us even know?
Something occurred to me recently. A friend gifted me Elizabeth Gilbert’s (author of “Eat, Pray, Love”) “Big Magic” a few months back. I’m a writer, yet I haven’t allowed myself time to read, something that is both essential to my growth as a professional, but also, a past time that I’ve always loved and have neglected in the name of ‘doing’ and ‘producing’ and ‘progressing’! ‘Big Magic’ is all about living creatively, with a twist - Gilbert finally addresses the tired and outmoded and tragically adopted false adage that goes a little something like this: In order to survive as an artist, or to live creatively and authentically and successfully, you must suffer for it. You must keep your demons close in order to fuel your creative fires. You must beat into action the very thing that lights you up the most - that once sacred, vibrant spark - in order to force it to support you.
Holy lightbulb. Screw that - holy CLARITY. Holy FREEDOM.
When we’re entrenched in ourselves and our work, whatever that work may be, we lose sight of things. We forget why we’re working so hard and what we’re even working towards. We work for the sake of working, for the sake of doing, but not for the sake of being. It’s when we lose our sense of being that we lose our purpose. We lose our sight. We lose that very essential clarity that reminds us yes, this is why I do what I do. This is why I strive, toil, rise, fall and rise again. This kernel is the core of my heart. This seed is what drives me to plant, nurture and tend to this personal pull, this tug, this urge to dedicate myself and my time and my love to this calling.
The month of March brought this calling, this seed into the light for me. The eclipses showed me the paths I’ve been pursuing, time and time and exhausted and defeated time again, the same way I always have. The days showed me humility; the weeks, a humbleness I’ve never felt before. And at the end of those weeks, I emerged with a renewed sense of power and determination. A feeling of dedication. A commitment to taking my life back so that I could resuscitate and show some much deserved and severely lacking respect to the very thing that’s always sustained me in the ways it was meant to, which means it’s my time to sustain it.
Sometimes that comes in the form of letting go to see what steps up. To release one dream to see if another comes into view, one that synchs more fully with where we are, right now. It can be a terrifying idea to even entertain, but what’s even more terrifying is not changing, not growing and not becoming what we know we’re capable of being, even if that ‘what’ isn’t clear yet. But that’s the adventure and exhilaration offered in the leap - you may not know where you’re going to land, but you will land, and you will be changed.
Change - that’s what I’m feeling as we step into this new month; an emergence from the cocoon of illusion, of (perhaps) self-imposed darkness. Maybe the eclipses were winter’s final hurrah, the last push down the birthing canal of the remnants of the last twelve months, equinox to equinox. The space WE’VE created by doing the work that ushered us raw and shaking into the year of the Fire Monkey, finally ready to review, reassess and redirect ourselves in a gentler, more loving, more proactive and more confident way of life. A totally fresh, totally exciting, totally NEW way. Not to mention, a totally needed one.
It is in this space that we’ve come to identify our comfort zones because we finally know what forged them, why we’ve stayed in them and what it takes to destroy them. This is all a Choose Your Own Adventure story, and these eclipses just provided us with a most righteous gateway to dominate a seemingly insurmountable Boss (think Super Mario Brothers! Or Zelda!) and finally transcend to the next level!
So, Happy April! Here’s to us all fertilizing Ostara’s energies of rebirth and revitalization into what we not only want, but absolutely deserve and are more than ready to become during this next turn around the sun!
