A Lunar Eclipse
{A Written Practice}
A Lunar Eclipse
The Blood Moon
Amongst the many mysteries of the celestial architecture, both Solar and Lunar eclipses stand out on Earth, and have throughout human history, for their power as portents, and the profound changes they make in the sky. A solar eclipse is the partial or full obscuration of the Sun by the moon passing between it and us. At the moment of totality in solar eclipse, the land goes dark and the disc of the sun is hidden behind the moon. A lunar eclipse, by contrast, happens when the shadow of the earth blocks the light of the Sun from reaching the moon. Some lunar eclipses give what is called the Blood Moon or red moon, so named because of the reddish cast that falls over the face of the moon during totality. This is a bit like a sunrise or sunset phenomenon, where the moon's color is shaded by light passing through the earth's atmosphere. Sunlight contains all colors of visible light. The particles of gas that make up Earth’s atmosphere are more likely to scatter blue wavelengths of light while redder wavelengths pass through. This is called Rayleigh scattering, and it’s why the sky is blue and sunrises and sunsets are often red.
A moment after totality, an energy that is hard to describe in words settles over the land. Watching the blood moon eclipse my chest began to vibrate, and pins and needles ran through my hands. It occurred to me that ordinarily we see the moon by the sunlight reflected off of her face, but in this moment where there was no reflected light, what I could see was her mass–her force. Perhaps it was this that I felt, perhaps something more mysterious. May it inspire you to seek out and experience a lunar or solar eclipse for yourself, with awareness, tracking what arises in your own felt sense.
Related Practices:
At the level of connecting with the more-than-human world, eclipses are connected with Sun and the Moon, so see Moon Phases, Watching the Sun Rise, and with stargazing. As we talk about building a relationship with her, we are firmly in the territory of Building Ropes. When we begin to think about her phases and their patterns, we are learning the pattern language of nature, and as we begin to notice patterns in how she is impacting us, we are tracking. Indigenous and traditional cultures revere the moon, and if we want to understand this more deeply we can increase our awareness of ancestral lifeways, and indigenous voices. When we are awed by her beauty, it brings us into the proper frame of heart for relating to Nature, something we can explore more deeply through Gratitude Practices.Photography: Stein Egil Liland | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.