Winter eclipsed

crocus

I did not expect to be still so long: a whole season. My cherished peaceful season—winter—which I normally let enfold me like a soft duvet that muffles the noise of the outside world. Winter in the north brings blessed quiet: adagio days, long nights, withdrawal into solitude to write.

Instead, I ventured into the clatter of the lower mania for the entire winter. I wasn’t fleeing the cold like the eastern snowbirds do. I simply wanted to be close to my family for a while. I struggled, while I was surrounded by the busyness of their southern lives, to find the stillness of my northern winter inside myself, even while spring was agitating all around me.

I found calm in expected and unexpected places: a mossy outcrop at Cattle Point just steps away from the crowd on Willows Beach; a temporarily empty stack on the central library’s second floor.

Now I’m home. Even here, the crocuses are blooming two weeks early. Not enough snow remains in the yard to roll up a snowball’s chance in hell. The calendar makes it official: Spring has arrived.

No!!!

I don’t want to emerge from my winter cocoon. My internal clock is topsy-turvy. I am two beats behind the orchestra and my notes are off key. I’m unsettled, ungrounded.

Henry Seltzer of astrograph.com writes:

Friday morning early, the New Moon that takes place in the final degree of Pisces is also a Solar Eclipse, thus an extra-powerful New Moon with long-term implications for individual and collective transformational development. Additionally the same day the Sun enters Aries for the important symbolism of the Spring Equinox, beginning the entirety of the season.

 

We will want to look closely into the symbolism of this powerful lunation for the clues to that which we will need to incorporate into our own process of dawning awareness and evolutionary growth. The cosmic message of this timing will speak to us in different ways depending on where we have arrived, along the outline of our path, and where indeed we might yet be stuck. This New Moon eclipse is especially poignant for us now, coming as it does in the aftermath of the recent perfection of the Uranus-Pluto square, the seventh in a series of seven, thus the last exact hit of their dynamic alignment for the next thirty years.

 

Eclipses are significant moments and you will want to be asking of this one, what exactly is the message for your life right now—what is the cosmos attempting to convey that speaks to your own particular situation?

Winter or spring—in every season, in fact—I start my days in front of the woodstove, sometimes reading, sometimes just sitting quietly in the dark. This morning I read a passage from Oriah’s The Call that echoed a book I was reading on the floor of the central library a few weeks ago, Ram Dass’s Polishing the Mirror. Seltzer’s question for this new moon solar eclipse evokes the message in both texts:

Be here now.

So simple, and yet so hard to do.

But if the crocuses can do it, I can, too.

7 Responses to “Winter eclipsed”

  1. Diana Z

    Welcome back home, Leslie! I’m sure LW is happy to have you back and your lower mainland family was sad to see you go.

    Your picture of a crocus really grabbed my attention because we are still covered in feet and feet of snow in the Maritimes. I can’t believe that the spring has already arrived in northern BC…and not here. 🙁 I’m almost despairing that it will never arrive and I will be trudging around in winter boots and ducking my chin in my heavy coat for months to come.

    Or maybe winter was so long because your blog went temporarily silent. 😉 Glad to have you back!

    Reply
    • commatologist

      The long Maritime winter must be a shock to your system after a couple of years in California, Diana! Don’t despair – only a few more months before the snow melts and you can plant your garden. (kidding. maybe)

      Thanks for missing me! xo

      Reply
  2. carin

    I get it. That lovely cocoon of winter insisting on tea and lazy afternoons… Here’s hoping just right amount of rainy days (also wonderfully insistent) will help you transition…

    And welcome back! I, too, missed your voice.

    Reply

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