When the Moment Becomes a Movement

The February 15 Solar Eclipse was a game changer. Why discuss an eclipse after it occurred?  For one, eclipses continue to ripple and resound throughout the airwaves two to four weeks after their moment.  The energy of eclipses is widely seen as unstable, disruptive, shocking, possibly even dangerous. It’s a cliché to say that madmen can more easily snap during the weeks surrounding an eclipse. They do. Yet there are also those who see eclipses as spectacular gifts –wonderful periods through which energetic downloads can pour from the angels.

Eclipses occur twice a year, six months apart, in different pairs of signs each year. In my experience, the energy is usually a little buzzy and wobbly, vibrating the atmosphere from mild irritation to the occasional higher voltage “snap” zone.  If something needs to change in your life, this energetic quivering makes it easier to resist your inertia and do what needs to be done.  It gets harder not  to change.  This is perhaps a “download” – but it’s not quite the transcendence that’s usually promised of the angels.

Yet occasionally such an eclipse occurs.  We’re seeing one now.  That a madman went shooting at a Parkland Florida high school a day before the eclipse was exact – that’s not so unusual.  The Sandy Hook massacre came during an eclipse season too.

But quickly it was apparent that this event was different. These victims were old enough to emerge from their trauma articulate, angry, idealistic, and impassioned. The students rose up with more than human power to finally say “No more!”  There’s the transcendence, there’s the celestial download.  Something turned.  A line was drawn.  Eclipses teach that change can happen overnight — keeping in mind that on Earth, “sudden” change has always been brewing for awhile.  Eclipses are like the final straw, the last pebble or snowflake that sends the structure tumbling.

The national gun conversation we’ve been seeing since February 14 just hasn’t been possible before.

The eclipses of spring 1996 were similarly potent. Two weeks before the lunar eclipse, a man entered a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland and killed 16 schoolchildren under 6 and their teacher.  Across the UK, people were shocked and shaken.  What happened next was the heavenly gift.  The grieving town demanded to know how an unstable man could get guns. Within a year and a half, lawmakers had banned private ownership of all handguns in mainland Britain, embracing some of the toughest anti-gun laws in the world.

How many future lives did those eclipse angels save?

Weeks later, ten days after the solar eclipse, another madman went on his shooting spree in Port Arthur, Australia, killing 35 and wounding 23 more. The gift? This was Australia’s last mass shooting. Within months of the massacre and at great political cost, the Australian government banned automatics and semiautomatics, adopted new licensing rules, established a national gun registry and a month-long waiting period for gun purchases. Lawmakers bought and destroyed more than 600,000 civilian-owned firearms—a cost that was actually funded by raising taxes!

Here in the USA, for decades now, after every mass shooting, we’re told we’re different.  Guns are somehow as important as religion here,  more important than even than the right to life.  “Thoughts and prayers” are widely disseminated in the hours and days after our mass shootings, when we’re also told “Now is not the time to talk about guns.”

That was the way it was before the Aquarius Solar Eclipse of 2018, but never again.  A line was drawn. This was a heavenly download eclipse, the kind that can change the trajectory of a nation.

The angels are now whispering in teenagers’ ears all across the country and these bright individuals are speaking up.  We—the adults who failed to make their world safe—are listening and cheering.  Aquarius rules democracy, revolution, activism, progress, humanitarian causes, teenagers, and bright new ideas.

The time for all of that has apparently come.

Was this a potent eclipse for you, be sure to treat yourself to one of April’s famous eclipse reports, available here.

Likely more influential than the eclipse is your transits and progressions, available here as Steven Forrest’s fabulous Skylog reports.

You can round out your star picture for the year with Mary Shea’s solar return report.  It’s best to order this one if your birthday falls within in the next or last three months.