Hello love. Happy Spring. Today we reach the point in the Earth's relationship to the sun that marks the vernal equinox and a new beginning. In the northern hemisphere this means the season of spring. Aries. The life force and all its ferocity. The power of will, and of mind, to move and make something happen.

Before we get to the beginning though, there is the ending.

Moments before the sun moves into Aries and it's officially SPRING two things will happen:

1.) From our vantage point on Earth the moon will move directly in front of the sun. This happens roughly once a month and is called the new moon. The new moon is the time when our two great luminaries come together and symbolically unite our personal light (moon) with the universal/divine light (sun). This meeting is a time when we metaphorically or literally plant seeds. We humble ourselves to the mystery of why anything is inspired to grow at all, the mystery contained in seeds themselves. In planting seeds we offer ourselves to a cycle. The seed which came from the death of its parent plant but holds all the information needed to become what it will be reminds us of our place in the cycle of time, in our lifecycle, lovecycle, mooncycle and so on. We are nothing if not spiralic.

2.) There will be a total solar eclipse. A TOTAL solar eclipse isn't your everyday eclipse, and this one is no joke. Just days after the last waxing square of the Uranus Pluto Relation, this eclipse falls on the last degree of the last sign of the zodiac and is the exclamation of all points proclaiming that NOW is the time to...

To die, to birth, to begin, to end, to be in the truth of the in-between places and transitional spaces that we are occupying all the time. The last degree of Pisces is a final dissemination and dissolving, the last sigh of release, the final farewell. At this point we no longer carry the hope of resurrection, redemption, or recovery. We let go completely, and it is in the letting go that we find some indescribable peace. Finally.

In whatever ways I find myself meditating these days; sitting, walking, dancing, moving- I have been trying to hold one very simple thought as my container.

There is no arrival. Just the process of arriving.

No noun, no finished product. As soon as I might think "ah... I've finally arrived", I know that I'm really just back at the beginning. My eagerness to know illuminates the immensity and impossibility of the unknown. When I think I've figured something out about myself or the process I'm in, it's important for me to let that figuring out take its place as one step in a long walk, not the end goal.

The same goes for relationships. I don't know about you, but I often find myself thinking that I know someone, and that I can say definitive things about them, what they like, how they function. At some point I'll find myself limiting them with my own beliefs, "But you're like this and so you should do that..." and realizing that not only have I shortchanged them their own potential for complexity and growth, but I've also robbed myself of the joy of open curiosity and the not knowing who someone is that is the very thing I was first attracted to.

We are in a time of HUGE unknown. When two of the most powerful transpersonal planets are in a definitive moment in their dance together. This dance began in the mid 1960's and carries the seeds of what was birthed in that era. Social change and upheaval, notions of personal freedom and expansive consciousness, institutional power and the potential of mediated information, civil rights, feminism, and the personal AS political.

Excellent articles have been written in the last few days on this aspect. Please read them if you are so-called to use this lens of astrology and planetary cycles to make sense, or at least give some meaning to, the events of our lives right now. Whether or not this language and process of meaning-making is appealing to you, the probability is that there is no way to make sense of the change whilst in the middle of it. Let's just say this for now:

Pure energy calls structure around it and seeks to make forms.

Forms create meaning and tangible process.

Through meaning and process energy shifts.

When energy shifts the form must either shift as well or dissolve, and in its dissolving leave its remnants to become something new.

Identification with the form is meaningless. Give your loyalty to the force that creates the form.

A lot of us are feeling all kinds of stuff right now. The inability to articulate our pressing need for knowing and self-growth. The fear of loss of all kinds but especially the fear of losing forms: our marriages, businesses, houses, relationships, and anything we've worked long and hard for. The fear of loss is in conflict with the spark of knowing (whether that knowing is conscious or not) that the form and the hard work is nothing you can take with you. It is not the arrival. There is no arrival. Just the process. I think that for most of us that is profoundly uncomfortable.

I've been playing with a working definition of compassion as "to be uncomfortable together". The word compassion means to suffer with. For a long time I've held the idea of 'suffering with' to mean a vast kind of empathy that dissolves my personal stories in the wake of all the collected stories, a Mother Theresa kind of compassion. More recently compassion seems to me to be more the byproduct of willingness to listen and be with someone and not have the answer or anything that can help them. This compassion can allow another person's suffering to exist but not have to do anything about it, or have the answer or be able to fix it, and definitely isn't about to take it on personally. This compassion can allow suffering to be and can be in the discomfort of not having any answers.

This is not me saying don't help if you can help. This is me saying that if you don't immediately know how to help, and if help isn't what's being asked for, don't help. Can you sit in the discomfort of not having anything to do, not knowing what to do, not being able to change it? Can you be with the profound helplessness of yourself? Can you let them have their own problems and not offer your advice? Can you still love them and listen? Can you do that for yourself? Can you stop trying to fix it, cure it. solve it, make it better? Stop diagnosing and working on it? It's ok that you're fucked up. You always will be. Can you just be there and not make any more excuses?

You know this is me talking to myself. But you also know this is me talking to you, because I know that this thing is human.

The cruel optimism that keeps us thinking that if only we were better, smarter, healthier, more capable of love, more capable of boundaries etc., the thing that we keep making resolutions around and seeing our shrinks for... It's probably going to still be there tomorrow. Friends, this is the Pisces-Virgo Axis. The two signs in the zodiac MOST associated with feeling faulted for being human. And this is the last degree. The place where we dissolve into absolute surrender and utter self-acceptance, where we decide to give less fucks, or not even give any at all. This is the moment of release.

Here is your meditation:

You are a plant. Which one? One that makes seeds. Place yourself as you feel compelled to: in the prairies, in the tropics, in the Pacific Northwest. You are a plant that makes seeds and you are about to die. You are dried up. Done. You had your springtime bud, you had your full bloom, you had your harvest. Now you have only these seeds held in your dried form and the wind, the rain and the animals are coming.

Feel yourself in your brittleness. Feel your husk. Feel your thin membrane becoming thinner and more porous and the whole world around you pouring in. Feel the seeds. Feel how once they held and gripped to you but now that their coverings are shiny and hard they start to slip away. Feel them slip away. Feel the wind, the rain and the animals come and shake them loose. Feel yourself get lighter as you lose them.

As each seed detaches feel a part of yourself leave with it. Bit by bit you scatter in the wind, are eaten by the animals, and driven by the rain into the mud and soil. You feel yourself dispersed. You are in countless places but you feel them all the same. The seeds hold all the potential. Over time the elements will soften their shells and given that they have been buried and underground long enough, they will sprout. What kind of seed are you?

A solar eclipse is the subjective, personal light over the divine light. Ask yourself these questions:

1.) what if my human faults and failings were divine? How can I see them, and myself as mythic?

2.) If my form is made from energy moving, how can I best honor that movement?

3.) Can I feel the light of the Supreme Sun, the Goddesses and Gods of my understanding, always, at my back, especially in the moments when I feel the most vulnerably human?

Here's to all we are growing together.

xo - Renee