This past weekend’s full moon / lunar eclipse was the finale in a series of eclipses that began in July 2018. These eclipses have triggered 2020’s potent conjunctions of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn at degree points that mark the United State’s formation through the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and recalls Saturn’s previous conjunction with Pluto in Capricorn in 1518, the year that the transatlantic slave trade was codified by King Charles I, magnifying and increasing the scope of Europe’s territorial expansion and genocidal projects in the Southern and Western hemispheres.

Eclipses are times when karma surfaces. The past always shapes the present. If the present is painful, we should look for the roots to its dis-ease. We will build futures of pain upon pain until the past is reckoned with. 

When deeply historic issues bring themselves forward as foundation for the largest social movement in history, turning the world’s attention and memory to centuries of horrific violence and suffering rooted in anti-blackness and religious entitlement... when a pandemic rages, illuminating inequity, inaccessibility, and blatant refusals by wealthy world leaders to care about (or believe in) anyone other than themselves... when economies are tumbling and there’s no end in sight and the wealth gap is gaping... when food and resource shortages are already extreme and growing... when it’s another “hottest year on record”... when species that sustain entire ecosystems are going extinct… we best stop and check in to reflect with ourselves.

Do we want to keep on living? What kinds of lives do we desire? What are the predominant feelings that we would like to experience every day? What are we working for? How are we embodying and relating with the feelings we want to have? Are we working to succeed in systems built on extraction, scarcity, competition, prejudice, false moralism, or racist/sexist/ableist/classist meritocracy? Are we defending stances and decisions we know aren’t that great because we’re scared to stop/lose power/be wrong about something? Are we willfully maintaining small ignorances and excuses that ripple out into big impact when this maintenance is the norm? Are we following the orders of the cops in our heads, enforcing militancy in our relationships, imprisoning ourselves with materialistic ambition?

Astrology doesn’t make shit happen, but it does provide a language to bring insight into what is happening and how we might meet our conditions and circumstances. This is a reckoning. One that is personal and collective. There is no place in the future for not caring for each other or our planet, because there is no place in the future for not caring for ourselves. We can use the power of this time, symbolized in this eclipse and its resonance over the next six months, to cut cords with the illnesses we’ve been born and bred to uphold. If we don’t cut these cords, ongoing pain is awaiting us. If we do commit to this work, the potential is a radical healing of our environment and societies, the scope of which has the power to transform and uplift every aspect of our lives.

Yesterday, I was joined by Michelle and Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish and Damien Thompson for a special full moon lunar attunement ritual working with these themes. Damien is a co-founder of Front Line Farming and a Food Justice visionary who shared with us some of the mission, approach and strategy of Front Line and invited us to consider how our current economic, political, and social systems promote and maintain scarcity and deficit mentalities, and how these mental states impact our relationships to land and food, and our own lives and relationships with scarcity and abundance.
 Michelle and Ramon are a power couple – visionaries, strategists, somatic educators, philosophers, and systems thinkers. They co-facilitated an ancestral remembering embodiment and writing practice that led us into a fruitful and deep conversation around ways that we can each ground ourselves in our intuition and inner knowing while also stepping forward into action. We concluded our ritual with a thorough exploration of the full moon chart and its relationship to the US chart for the Declaration of Independence which then opened up a broader conversation on astrological symbolism within our personal lives and locations.

This conversation and ritual space is an offering for the next two weeks of the waning lunar cycle as we move through the potent residual integration of yesterday’s eclipse energy. The recorded ritual is available for immediate download and is accessible by sliding scale. If you know of friends or family who may enjoy and benefit from this work, please share it with them! 100% of the proceeds from the live ritual and the recording will be donated to Front Line Farming.

I hope you will agree that it is far past time for striation of causes. As a person who has spent much of my life in white liberal environments, I am deeply familiar with those who lament environmental destruction while refusing to see that the roots and branches of this devastation lie in colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. We treat this earth as an extension of how we treat each other, which is always a mirror for what we refuse to look at in ourselves. If there are solutions to the immense and unimaginable suffering that human-caused pollution and climate chaos has and will cause (because, the worst is yet to come), they lie in learning to hold our human, plant, and animal relationships with reverence and care. In order to heal with our planet we need to heal with each other. This work requires ALL of us. Call your people IN. There is no extension on this deadline. It’s now or never.

Wishing you a potent, healing, full moon and eclipse integration.

With love and deep respect,
Renee