This past weekend there was a total lunar eclipse that caught many folks’ attention. The very sensational “super blood wolf moon” title I think helped a lot with that.

My own birthday was just a day before a total lunar eclipse, something I didn’t know until I learned how to read my birth chart. Strange how when something is about you, you suddenly become interested in a more personal way.

While the astronomical event itself was very cool and rare (next comparable event is in May 2021 — mark your calendars!), the skies where I live were unforgivingly overcast and forced me to think a little more about what eclipses mean.

I haven’t yet delved into learning about the different eclipse families, so this isn’t a technical post about astronomic events. This is more a re:processing of my reflection of life purpose. Michael Beckwith frames the “meaning of life” question a little more interestingly — what is the universe is trying to express through you?

I first encountered this video a few years ago while living outside Boston in an apartment my partner and I muscled through by writing parodies of our mental state with titles like “Love Dies in a Auto-Mall Apartment.” It’s easy to imagine that we desperately wanted to patch up where we’d landed to better fit the images we each had for our lives, and our life together.

His line of questioning felt unique and astonishing to me at the time, and I’ve since referred it to a few friends who expressed feeling stuck or drifting. I’m now seeing the connection between these ideas and the lesson of the eclipses.

The real juice of this is in those questions, and cuts immediately to thinking about karmic theory. I’m also not going to pretend to be an expert on karma here, but the key word that makes that link is “action”.

The problem I’ve been wrestling with is how to stay earnestly invested in living in the world, rather than working to step outside of it or to disassociate. How can I want to create things and help lift boulders with others doing tremendous work and also want to call out that it’s all an illusion and so my holding onto anything is just a sign of my personal limitation. How can have edges of truth but neither be quite right? This, I’m finding, is the problem, the question, and the answer that my near-eclipse birthday invites me to think about, which I’ll write more about soon.