Eclipse Season Storm :: The Flash-to-Bang Corridor
The Sun is currently passing over the South Node in Capricorn, marking the mid-point of this eclipse season storm. We are still right in the thick of things.
Have you ever counted the seconds between lightning and thunder? To figure out how far away the lightning is?
Light travels faster than sound. The rumbling thunder is the vibrating sound, the sonic shock wave, resulting from the lightning’s intense electrical discharge being forced through air particles in the atmosphere, expanding them with its heightened pressure and temperature.
The time lapse between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, is referred to as the flash-to-bang measurement.
Divide the number of seconds counted between seeing lightning and hearing thunder, by five. If you are at sea level, the resulting number equates to roughly how many miles away the lightning is.
Five seconds counted between lightning and thunder? That means the lightning is about one mile away.
The moment in-between our experience of these two associated phenomenon of lightning and thunder, is electrically charged, dynamic, unstable, anticipatory.
A breath held, a prayer whispered, a thrill down the spine, a cold shudder, a dash for cover, hands over ears, a pregnant pause.
Eclipses come in pairs every six months.
During an Eclipse Season Storm, lasting for approximately 36 days, the first eclipse is like the lightning. This would be January 5th’s solar eclipse new moon at 15 degrees Capricorn.
The corresponding eclipse that follows, is like the thunder. This would be early January 21st in Leo, (or Jan. 20th for many of you depending on time zone).
In between the two, is the 2-week eclipse portal; the flash-to-bang measurement.
A slice of life sparking with destabilizing shifting energies of fast-moving, uncertain change that are being forced, with great, deep, aching, stretching rumbles, through a narrow space-time channel into human existence.
The first quarter moon in Aries on Sunday (January 14th) created the pivoting moment in the journey up through this two-week portal. A sharpening of anticipation, and a time to take deliberate action.
The eclipse storm ripples out in both directions for about a 36-day period, but it is the two weeks of flash-to-bang that are arguably the most energetically charged.
Exciting? Sure, perhaps. Storms can be quite exciting. An exhausting disorienting whirlwind? Also a possibility.
Where’s Capricorn in your chart? Where’s the storm zone? What house does Capricorn rule (i.e. what house cusp does it cover?), and if you use a quadrant house system as I do, additionally, where might ~13-23 degrees of Capricorn land for you if not the same house?
This area of life will be stormy, intense and deeply transformative for a while yet. It will likely be utterly deconstructed, and then completely rebuilt in the coming years.
This eclipse season is just making some LOUD initial announcements about what we can continue to expect in the next 2 years or so… as Saturn, Pluto and the South Node, dance within a few degrees of each other, building to their much anticipated January 12th, 2020 conjunction at 22°47″ Capricorn, paving the way for Jupiter’s Cappy journey that will launch a month prior.
The Capricorn storm zone is occurring in my 5th house of creative self-expression, so the themes of the two eclipses (the other in creative Leo) blur together a bit for me.
As the Capricorn eclipse took place in the dark sky last week (the lightning strike), I put some art I had made, online for sale. I don’t really expect it to go anywhere right now, but the very act of making it public online was the achievement of a personal goal for me – the beginning of a much longer-term dream.
I’ve also recently returned to (and nearly completed) a drawing instructional book that I’ve tried to finish a million times since I was a child basically, called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
The book is so brilliant. I’m really quite astounded by my progress. The before and after drawings of others who have taken the author’s course as well, attest to the effectiveness of her teaching .
Drawing is a vulnerable thing for me.
After high school, I was headed to art school. I began to prep an application portfolio.
My dad at this time, made an ever so innocent comment… or confused question… which got a bit stuck in my psyche. He was wondering why I was applying to art school. He was surprised. He pointed out that I had not spent my childhood drawing and painting.
He wasn’t against it per se, just puzzled at my choice.
My art focus didn’t involve a lot of drawing and painting. I loved textile art, mosaics, mixed media collages… My drawing was, indeed, rather awkward with little sense of perspective or proportion.
My dad’s dad (my grandfather) was a skilled painter. My dad had been chasing his dad’s love, acceptance, and approval with his painting and drawing efforts for many years; his easel forever set up in the basement, trembling and getting dusty on a foundation of self-doubt.
That’s often how it works though, isn’t? Those repeating patterns, that stubborn conditioning, and the unsatisfied generational chain-links of parental approval-seeking in the psyche, being passed on.
It really was an innocent comment, but for me it indicated that my dad didn’t “see me” as an artist. And so, persuaded by a few other influences, my path diverted somewhere more “academic”.
I don’t believe that anyone needs to be able to create realistic drawings to be considered an artist, but still, teaching myself how to draw is a reclamation of sorts for me.
The book asserts that drawing is really about SEEING things as they are, learning how to truly deeply see (and to trust what we are seeing), rather than perfecting some technical skill. I’m drawing things that have life in them! And I’m so excited about it.
But of course the Sun met shadowy Pluto last Friday (January 11th) in my 5th house, and I was embarrassed and dismayed by the lack of affirmative response I received from people close to me when I showed them my drawings.
I mean, they responded positively, but the drawings are still sketchbook experiments, not van Gogh. There honestly is no way they could have responded in a way that would have been “enough” for me, because my sense of vulnerability was so heightened.
I feel dumb sharing this really, because it is so minor. But my response being so disproportionate to the interaction, alerted me to a red flag that I had touched on a deeper issue.
I walked it off while reflecting on Sun-Pluto, and reminding myself how Pluto is so good at bringing the past into the present moment, whether we are conscious of it or not (and hopefully we ARE conscious of it, or we will project that shit on to others).
I was working with “old stuff”, old insecurities and identity narratives about not being “a person who could draw”, about not being an artist (plus the Sun and Saturn/Capricorn often have father associations). I offered myself my own compassion and validation, and told myself that it was always a hard but courageous thing to shift old identity beliefs and frameworks, and to try new things.
I share this because maybe many of you had similar emotions arise in response to completely different themes and circumstances. A lot of people in my life are having very intense long-term Pluto transits to personal planets or points, so the few days of this Sun-Pluto transit showed up quite vividly for others around me.
Astrology is really wonderful at helping to create more space “between stimulus and response”, between the emotional trigger and our habitual reactions. Some positive astrological self-talk can help when you’ve made the connection.
Locate your “Cap storm zone” in your chart, monitor this thematic area of life for the next couple of years according to its house themes, and then offer yourself compassion, as this area of life deeply and thoroughly, is challenged, excavated and rebuilt.
I was trying to figure out when the #HowHardHasAgingHitYou viral challenge had taken off. This trend of posting your first facebook profile or a photo from 10 years ago, alongside a recent photo, is very Sun-Pluto. I’m not certain, but it seems to have started blowing up feeds within a few days of the Sun-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn on January 11th.
How hard has aging hit you?!
Capricorn rules time and aging. The Sun is our vitality, our ego, our obsession with selfies. Pluto is the god of Hades, ruling over mortality, raw uncomfortable truth, the human condition, the human shadow, human fear and vulnerability, and the alchemy of transformation.
How appropriate then, that during this amped-up Cap Season, millions of people are prompted to confront the truth of their aging faces and bodies with side-by-side photos, ~10 years apart?
I also read articles suggesting that this trend had been planted to contribute the improvement of facial recognition algorithms. One article on this topic concluded by emphasizing some of Capricorn’s favourite words – respect, due diligence, sophistication:
The broader message, removed from the specifics of any one meme or even any one social platform, is that humans are the richest data sources for most of the technology emerging in the world. We should know this, and proceed with due diligence and sophistication.
Humans are the connective link between the physical and digital worlds. Human interactions are the majority of what makes the Internet of Things interesting. Our data is the fuel that makes businesses smarter and more profitable. We should demand that businesses treat our data with due respect, by all means. But we also need to treat our own data with respect. (Kate O’Neill for Wired)
This article speaks to Mercury in Capricorn (applying to a conjunction with Pluto), Pluto’s paranoia, and the potential darker motivations beneath a seemingly innocuous facebook game (Pluto). You don’t have to go far to find many examples of this Cap Season tense shake-up (or shut-down) in news headlines this month.
Just the day before the Sun’s conjunction with Pluto, as it traveled that thorny 8-degree corridor between Saturn and Pluto, a mentor in my life asked for my permission to “hold me accountable” (Saturn) with taking action toward something that scared me (Pluto).
This is so aligned with the astro. I know a few people who are experiencing a similar type of accountability dynamic.
I gave my permission because I trusted her to not shame me into doing something, but rather to apply some gentle pressure and reminders to ensure I didn’t back away.
Astrologers have repeatedly highlighted the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of January 12th, 2020, but these are slow moving planets – really, the conjunction is active right now.
It will grow more intense as we near January 2020, but it is active all year as the planets repeatedly come within 5 degrees of each other – both playing tag with the South Node, which likes to bring all our excesses and comfortable defenses to light, so that we can address them and grow.
How will we be held accountable as individuals and as societies, for our actions, for our growth, for how we manage our resources, for facing down fears to do the right thing, the hard thing, the true thing? How can we intentionally hold ourselves and each other accountable, with love and grace?
How might we learn to accept natural and just consequences and outcomes for our past actions and effort, both those favourable and uncomfortable – and then move forward pragmatically with wisdom and courage?
Capricorn is associated with the past, with history, and with tradition. But at its highest expression this doesn’t mean that Capricorn energy remains stubbornly stuck in the past, refusing to grow. Rather, Capricorn has great respect for what history and the passage of time can teach us, and for the wisdom that elders and older mentors can impart to us.
Capricorn looks to the tangible past with a discerning eye, in order to build a better future with a realistic understanding of earthly limitations and constraints.
How can we learn from the past, from our ancestors, in order to stop repeating detrimental patterns, while also healing and building on the solid foundations, the ancient knowledge, that exists beneath the ruins and chaos?
Self-care, and mutual care-giving, is essential for a Capricorn journey that requires us to sustain our endurance and pace our energy expenditure over the long-haul.
This current eclipse season, and especially this eclipse portal between eclipses, this flash-bang channel, has been… exhausting. Somewhat volatile for many. I’ve been energetically flattened. I feel like I have massive jet lag. What about you?
Find your ground.
Stabilize to refuel while opening up to welcome whatever the unpredictable storm winds are blowing in.
The upcoming total lunar (full moon) eclipse is the last in the Leo-Aquarius series. Eclipses occur when the Sun is near the North or South end of the nodal axis (every 6 months).
The nodal axis was in Leo and Aquarius beginning May 9th, 2017 (with a foreshadowing early Leo eclipse on February 10th, 2017), and then the nodal axis transitioned into Cancer and Capricorn about 18 months later on November 6th, 2018.
Eclipses can occur whenever the Sun is within 18 degrees of either end of the nodal axis. Thus, we often experience an overlap with our eclipse series because a zodiac sign spans a distance of 30 degrees.
Therefore, even though the nodal axis is now firmly in Cancer and Capricorn at about 26 degrees (moving backwards), it is close enough to the Leo-Aquarius border that we will get one more eclipse on this zodiacal axis – the total lunar eclipse in Leo on January 20th/21st, just as the Sun leaves Capricorn to launch Aquarius Season.
This lunar eclipse is the corresponding full moon culminating match to the Leo solar new moon eclipses that occurred on August 21st, 2017, and August 11th, 2018.
What creative project, self-actualization effort, heart-centered passion pursuit, has been beating your heart’s drum since early 2017, according to your chart’s Leo house? Are you seeing a culminating moment of that fiery dream leaping into full manifestation this month?
The Leo lunar eclipse, squaring the erratic, bold and liberating action-oriented Uranus, occurs simultaneously with a sugary and spicy Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Sagittarius, square Neptune (exact on January 22nd), and a cardinal Mars-Saturn square (exact January 21st).
The creative forces of connection, love, unity, harmony, pleasure, risk-embracing naive faith, and optimistic dreamy expansion, are powerful… but so too, is the pressure, friction, divisive separating impulses, as well as the themes of heavy constriction, struggle, duty, and responsibility.
This is a potent springboard, nevertheless. Use it wisely.
P.S. This upcoming lunar eclipse has a few dramatic descriptive adjectives connected to it. I want to point out that during ALL total lunar eclipses, the full moon will have a red tinge to it because it is reflecting the sun’s light hitting its surface through the Earth’s atmosphere. This means they are dramatically called “blood moons” in the media, but you can also just call them a total lunar eclipse. Same thing.
Furthermore, this lunar eclipse/ full moon is closer to Earth than other full moons (i.e. near to the Moon’s perigee point in its elliptical orbit) which has earned these lunations a “super” prefix, and this is worth taking into interpretative consideration, but it is not really a rare occurrence 🙂
