When I began learning about the nature of eclipses a few years ago, I started to dread them, my existential uncertainty about the unknown heightened.

Whenever I start getting all heady about astro-talk, I remind myself to return to the here and now, where my body and present reality is - the only place I can shape change.

Back in the cycle of my second nodal return (where my natal North and South Node greets where the nodes are hanging out now AKA where the eclipses occur), I could not predict for myself what would eventuate as we approached the lunar eclipse in Pisces: the end of a relationship, and the death of my father.

As I move through this past month with an aching loss in my heart, grief keeps opening a certain clarity and vitality in it’s wake.

There is an emptiness I feel a rush to fill with noise and someone else’s voice. Some days I do, until my eyes and ears says: no more.

~

I use my Scorpio detective powers to look for mini clues of care and support, instead of where this is lacking.

Old friends I haven’t spoken to in years unexpectedly reaching out to send their condolences and care packages.

Every kind word, every loving message, every hug, every heartfelt gesture, every silence that doesn’t rush to fill the space when my tears arrive ~ even when someone is fumbling for words, I let myself feel their loving intent.

I keep letting myself be carried, be held, be cared for, be supported.

I watch in current time how I am rewriting an old, sticky story that tells me that I am always the one offering care and support and never feeling cared for or supported in the way I need.

I witness how care and support is always available to me when I look for it. My friend brings me peach tulips, another friend points out my dad’s favourite bird (rainbow lorikeet), yet another teaches me how to make smoked salmon bagels and do tax deductions. The earth holds me close when I lay down on the grass. A candle reminds me how my inner flame is still flickering.

I learn the myriad languages of care by how my family’s community keeps showing up for us. I already know how to be an island unto myself so I practice reaching out for connection, and allow myself to be comforted and loved.

I join a book club. I meditate and move with The Daily Rest. I receive energy healing and visit my Shiatsu masseuse. I tell my therapist my dad died and his eyes well up with tears. I let myself feel his resonance in the enormity of my experience.

I take salt baths nearly every night. I start going out dancing again.

I say hello to all the beautiful blossoms heralding the start of spring.

I feel my capacity to Be With What Is growing and growing and growing.

The grief arrives in waves. Sometimes ferocious and gushing, other times a gentle trickle on my shore.

I embrace grief like an old friend, the Sadness Dragon That Lives Under The Ocean I slowly became besties with since Saturn entered Pisces in 2023.

~

Our attempts and choices to care for ourselves heighten in times of loss, separation, change. Your future self is showing you how, your past selves are reminding you why.

Your present self gets to choose.

We are all touched by one another in this collective web, whether or not we are awake to this felt experience. Our personal experiences ripple out into the field of the whole. The collective field impacts us too, daily.

Sometimes community isn’t trying to stay in another crowded room where you immediately feel the familiar ache of not-belonging.

Sometimes community simply starts with noticing how you are already in relationship with yourself, your body, the land where you stand, the trees and the bees and the wind and the sun and the rainbow when you just needed another glimpse of hope.

~

I feel clearer about my work in the world as I keep living into this wild continuum of change.

Walking beside you as you are crossing a threshold and in transition. When you’re at the edge and want to leap but you’re terrified. The liminal space can feel ghostly, a ghastly cast over the flashing lights of a bustling city you now want to leave.

Even in endings there are always beginnings and in beginnings there is already the seed of an ending. How can you trust yourself to take the risk to move towards an uncertain future when it holds the spectrum of possibility of your greatest fears and your greatest joys?

The shore from here to there may seem far, but when you make space to feel what’s in the waters, what you’ve been avoiding gently meets you at the shore you’re at right here, right now.

You may be experiencing remnants of grief, sorrow, a simmering rage, guilt, overwhelmed by the heaviness of these times. Yet you know you are here to imagine and create and embody new blueprints for loving and living and playing and working that the world keeps telling you over and over: don’t be silly, that’s not possible.

Remind yourself it is by feeling into the evidence every single day.

꩜

My books are open again for Libra season for somatic sessions, astrology readings and intimate Moon sessions to increase your levels of attunement to your inner life so your bandwidth for meeting Life widens.

Join me at the turn of this equinox to welcome in fresh winds.

A single hope for you this Libra season,
that you feel the humming of
your own beauty
(all over your body)
whenever you see something that makes
you go:
oh, how beautiful

♡

Rachel x