Eclipse in the first house: And the scabs fall off…

I like this picture of a replica of Donatello’s David (1430) (front view here) with the paint peeling off his butt like a scab. After the partial lunar eclipse in my first house (conj Jupiter opp Venus) this past weekend, it feels like the ones on my metaphorical behind are falling off too.

I can’t really explain what’s happened — nothing ‘big’ has occurred (so far). It is more like a sense that something’s shifted, and that while the movement was minimal the effects are multiplied. It’s a bit like that arcade game where you drop in coins one by one trying to move the coins in the moving drawer bit by bit. The process seems to take forever and then suddenly you drop in a coin at the right moment and a whole bunch (and maybe a prize or two) falls into the tray.

Lunar eclipse conjunct Mars: Curtain call

One of the benefits of writing a blog is being able to go back and look at what you’ve written. I have been trying to put the New Year’s Eve lunar eclipse, which was conjunct my Mars, into words and I forgot that one of the eclipses in the summer of 2009 was also a few degrees away opposite my Mars. I wrote then that it felt like a lot of little lights were going out in my life.* This time around, with all the other stuff going on (Mercury and Mars retrogrades and so on), it doesn’t feel so much like lights going out, more like curtains being drawn. And the set for the next scene isn’t up yet.

The winter travel chaos in the UK have seen me hiding out at home for the past week since I got back from being away most of December. I spent New Year’s Eve alone at home (already spent Christmas with the family) — what better way to herald a Cancer eclipse? In fact, I slept through the countdown. And then as the first week of 2010 wore on, I realised that I was sleeping … and sleeping … and when I wasn’t eating or washing … I was sleeping.

The lunar eclipse and my 2nd and 8th house axis

Really, I was going to come up with a wittier title to this post, but I’m still ‘reverbing’.

This lunar eclipse is supposed to ‘sprout the seeds’ of the solar eclipse in Cancer.

Well, on the day of that solar eclipse, after my happy encounter with the new energy provider, I went to see my bank for a debt consolidation loan and was turned down. Okay. It wasn’t too unexpected. Banks are jittery these days. I just made other plans to reduce not-a-very-large-but-large-enough-to-cause-minor-cash-flow-headaches credit card debt each month. Part of it is caused by a dispute with a previous employer, the details of which I will not enter into. This lunar eclipse is supposed to bring closure to events occurring about 18 months ago when this cycle of Leo-Aquarius eclipses began. Well, about 18 months ago, I left that job and started a new one.

On the verge of … verging

The title of this post came from a comment by my astro-blogging friend, Neeti Ray. I was trying to describe the weird sense of limbo I’m feeling that I can’t shake, like being on the verge of something that hasn’t yet manifested, and she wrote: ‘On, the verge of, verging’. Perfect! My original title was going to be ‘How to be in two places at once’.

As Venus opposes Pluto this weekend, continuing to put pressure on my own natal Venus-Pluto square, my thoughts turn to how one might process, or, indeed, metabolise, pain. With her customary bluntness, Lucy describes Venus’ recent ingress into Cancer as being akin to putting a ‘Band Aid on a gunshot wound’. It made me think again about the nature of Plutonian pain. And then there is what Elizabeth Spring describes as the ‘core pain’ of Neptune (no doubt accentuated by its conjunction to Chiron). If Plutonian pain is like a gunshot wound, I’d say Neptunian pain is like a bruising — you don’t notice it at first, until you accidentally press on it, or bump into the furniture again!

Lunar eclipse conjunct Mars: Lights go out

The recent Capricorn lunar eclipse didn’t seem to have affected me in a dramatic way, but more subtly. The eclipse occurred a few degrees away from my Mars and I know I woke up on the day feeling like my fire had been put out. I was fortunate enough to take the day off.