Perhaps a cryptic question at first glance, but it bubbled up in me while I sat musing about the lunar eclipse of 28 August. Two weeks earlier there was all the fuss around the solar eclipse. That was when we symbolically stepped over a threshold into a new collective movement. A movement about contributing to something larger than yourself, out of your own strength and your own particular nature.
This Pisces eclipse has an entirely different colour. It asks you to release what has had its time. What have you outgrown? Maybe that old dream you held on to for so long no longer fits, or you realise that some of your ideals have lost their shine. Expectations you are allowed to admit are no longer realistic. And what matters here is not: oh well, never mind, onwards — but the real daring to let go, with the grief, pain or fear that comes with it. Being consciously present at this process of letting go and surrender is what clears the way for something new. Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac, and this is the last eclipse in Pisces for now. A closing piece, truly.
The monkey between two vines
Letting go is almost as worn out a word as trust, which I wrote about earlier. I always see images that help me make something tangible. And for me it is the monkey swinging on vines in a tropical rainforest. He has released one vine and has not yet caught the next. So he hangs in mid-air. Will he reach that next vine? He goes anyway.
I know I have to let go of something in order to take hold of the next thing, something I do not yet know the shape of. And mid-air offers me nothing to hold on to. So what does? That monkey has nothing to hold on to outside himself either. His body makes the jump without knowing.
Holding on is the opposite of letting go
How often do you look for something to hold on to outside yourself when you are hanging in mid-air? In my own life I am experiencing this very directly at the moment, and sometimes I still feel like a floundering baby in the middle of it. My personal strength is not built on control, however much my head keeps telling me otherwise.
From half past four on the morning of 28 August the earth’s shadow slid across the moon. At 06:14 she was 93% inside it, low above the western horizon. At 06:53, here, she set while still dark. She only came out of the shadow at 07:53, far below the horizon, where nobody saw it.
When I let go of the wheel I turn out to be a self-driving car. Something in me knows the road without my steering. And the destination presents itself.