Since I last wrote the world has changed with international relationships feeling more precarious than ever and in my personal world the death of a parent. The inner and the outer is in a state of play with new positions being jostled for on all stages and a certain sense of being adrift as I wait for ritual of a funeral to honour a life. It somehow seems fitting the blood moon has been full in the sky through the night just disappearing over the skyline in the final stages of the eclipse. With so much going on its good to think about resources and nourishment and what we can do to support ourselves.
A lunar eclipse is the meeting of light and shadow in the psyche. The light is what we know in our everyday consciousness and the shadow contains material outside of our daily awareness, the unconscious. This may be deeply repressed memories and experiences, patterns of behaviour and relating we are not aware of or simply the forgotten shopping list. Light and shadow are both seemingly unfathomable spaces going into the boundlessness of the potential for our conscious minds and the depths of our shadow material. The eclipse brings together the conscious and unconscious and with that a potential for something new. An integration of the opposites. Eclipses are transient a brief moment in time a reminder that what is in the shade can come out into the light and be transformed. In much the same way as when we compost our garden and food waste – it is in the depths of the darkness the magical alchemical process of transforming waste into beautiful, sweet compost occurs. We bring it into the light and use it to nurture new growth or refresh the old to bring nutrients to it.
There is something awe inspiring about an eclipse; it is as if the world stands still for a moment, a break a question a potential: Will life return? In the early hours of this morning the birds stopped singing a pause in their dawn chorus and then as if by magic the sound returned with the light. When we are working through the depths of difficult inner material or in the ravages of a deep grief we can lose faith and wonder if life will return. In nature life does return without the machinations we humans go through on our inner journeys.
The moon is associated with the anima, the feminine aspects of self. The place of intuition and emotion – the hidden depths of our psyche. At times of eclipse the potential to bring light into the shadow is particularly potentised a guide on our journey to wholeness. A journey of integration of the repressed and known material and in that all is transformed.
I really value the processing of difficult inner material much as I value the process of composting. There is nothing like our old familiar relationships to bring up reactions. We can get stuck in dark places and return to them time and again. I have been thinking about how we can hold onto the light or love or a sense of purity of our consciousness when faced with old patterns of relating or reacting. Can we bring intention into our lives an aware of those old patterns and in this process some separation. This is not about denying the existence of difficulties – it is about shining a light on what we know and using that light to penetrate the darkness to enable us to bring compassion to the hurt and tender parts of ourselves and awareness of the hurt parts in others.