The Eclipse, the Zodiac, and I

Did you see the lunar eclipse last week?

I did. I've been feeling better lately. Less depressed, more energetic, more steady and stable. But the night of the lunar eclipse, well, I was a mess.

I sat in the coffee shop and felt like I was losing it, once again. Friends came in and out, made conversation with me, cracked jokes. All the while I felt as though I would never want to connect with, or even speak to, another human being again. Was it SAD, or was this really just me? Is my depression, this horrible beast that takes me over, what defines me? I was so filled with self-doubt, self-loathing. I couldn't fathom asking someone else to deal with this, to deal with me, when I couldn't even stand being with myself. I avoided eye contact with strangers and friends alike, sure they could see the despair in my eyes. I sat in the coffee shop, in between quick jaunts out into the cold to view the darkening moon, and silently cried.

I wrote this in my journal:

"I am so utterly alone. I ache. My body physically hurts from the pain in my soul. I don't even know what's wrong. I want nothing more than to not be alone, to not feel death creeping into me, stealing my soul in broad daylight, in public. Is this SAD? Is this me, who I am, real, forever? Will I always be this way? Tonight is the first time in a while that I haven't wanted to go on living. I don't feel like I want to kill myself. But I don't want to live this way. The hopelessness, the alone-ness--they are exhausting me. I want to walk, but it is -2 degrees out. I want to sleep, but that has the unfortunate consequence of requiring waking up again. Aside from those things, I only want to stop all of this."

That's awful, isn't it? I swear, this has a valid point, and I don't feel that way most of the time.

I've lately been feeling like I am more connected to nature, to the earth, than most people. My days truly rotate around the sun--it dictates so much of my life. I feel the sunshine in ways that I've never heard anyone else describe; I often feel that I can tell whether or not it is going to be a sunny day before I open my eyes in the morning. Rarely do I have a good day when it is cloudy out, and rarely do I have a bad day when it is sunny out. The smell of unfrozen dirt or growing things brings me a leap of joy that I feel physically in my chest. I love the sunshine, yet I also love night, the cool, enveloping darkness, the moon, the stars. They are characters in my existence instead of mere props.

So when Garrison Keillor joked on A Prairie Home Companion on NPR the other day that it's natural to feel depressed around a lunar eclipse, I immediately Googled it. This is what I found:

There is an Eclipse in Virgo today (Feb 20). It is a total Lunar Eclipse - completely blocking out the Sun for those of us living in the US. The Eclipse takes place at 2′ Virgo and will impact you directly... if you were born on the cusp of your sign [I was, right on the cusp, actually, by the way]. Because this is a total Eclipse it is extremely emotional. It also impacts the seasonal degrees (Cancer [I'm a Cancer], Capricorn, Aries, and Libra)... This eclipse is bringing up feelings of disappointment, alienation, frustration and failure for many people, not to mention physical illness. These are emotional feelings. But most of us cannot quite put our finger on the source of the problems.

Most of my readership probably likens astrology to worshiping Pan, or listening to death metal or something. I used to. I would covertly sneak peeks of the horoscope page in Seventeen magazine growing up, so sure of the sheer evil of my actions that I would rarely make it even two sentences into my forecast. But now I'm not so sure that astrology is the devil's handiwork any more than most anything else.

I've read enough to think that there may be something to it. There is little that is more spiritual to me than planetary movements (i.e. seasons), natural cycles, etc. I think it is entirely possible that the position of the earth in relation to the sun, the moon, the stars, and other planets impacts how we behave and even personality, and that being aware of it could be a good thing.

Mercury just recently stopped being in retrograde, which means that communication for that time is more difficult than normal. I definitely noticed this to be true.

I'm not going to become the crazy old lady down the street who won't leave her house if her hokey horoscope isn't the brightest. But I think I'm going to try to be aware of what the galaxies have to say about my sun sign (Cancer) and my moon sign (Aries). I come to believe more all the time that life is rarely black and white. There is good and bad in everything, and I'm thankful for the chance to see the good.