The Edge of Becoming—New Moon Hybrid Solar Eclipse—April 20th.
There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming—Sue Monk Kidd.
This week, the Moon withdraws into the darkness, slipping between the familiar body of the Earth and the fierce light of the Sun. This new Moon invites us to stand expectantly at the edge of something new.
New Moons speak of fertile new beginnings. They signify those edges of becoming that make us feel young, alive again. And yet, as the Moon lays her soft white body over the Sun tonight, we may be overcome with a strange tiredness, a listlessness that sucks at our energy as if our own life-force was eclipsed.
This rare hybrid solar eclipse at the very last degree of Aries signifies an ending and the birth of something new, which may be a change in perspective, a new way of being in the world, a reliquishment of the need to hold on so tightly. If we imagine the moon’s pale body briefly obscuring the light of the sun, we may sense, in the darkness, the soft presence of a deeper knowing, the urgent thrust of life force that compels us to move beyond our fear.
Eclipses act like wild cards. They drop into our birth charts or into the charts of nations, catapulting us from our place of comfort, taking us to the edge. They fizz with an urgency that may reshape our choices and invite us to be more attentive to the longing of our soul. Hybrid solar eclipses occur only a few times each century. We will engage with the deeper meaning of this celestial event if this eclipse energises an axis or conjoins a personal planet in our birth chart.
Astrological Aries carries the heat of fire that ignites an ancient urge to battle and survive. Tonight we engage with the archetype of the heroine/hero. Tonight as we feel the firepower, we may be inspired by those who challenged patriarchy, dared to risk, to speak out. As we imagine the fierce courage and commitment of trailblazers like Cornish-born Emily Hobhouse who exposed the horror of the British concentration camps in South Africa and was an avid opponent of the first world war, or Jane Goodall who has worked tirelessly for the welfare and survival of primates, and writer and sage, Maya Angelou, (all born as the Sun moved through the flames of Aries,) we will sense the potency of this astrological archetype.
This Aries eclipse marks the beginning of the eclipse season that will last until October 28th with this year’s final partial lunar eclipse (5° Taurus.) It charges the powerful, final degree of Aries (29° 50′) and belongs to a family of eclipses (Saros 7 North) that pertain to what astrologer Bernadette Brady describes as igniting “sudden passions and lust to birth and procreative drives that may catch people off guard and confront them with their own very deep passion which may have been hidden for many years.”
With a challenging square to Pluto and a weakening conjunction to Jupiter, this eclipse releases a renewing surge of energy from the heavens that may inspire us to confront a situation, or bravely relinquish our need to engage in a futile power struggle.
There’s nothing subtle about this hybrid eclipse. It conveys the qualities of Pluto’s long passage through Aquarius, which will influence world events and our own lives for the next 20 years. The effects of this solar eclipse will linger for six months and may manifest as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, financial and political crisis, socio-economic change.
The Sun advances into the steady earth sign of Taurus on April 20th, as Mercury moves Retrograde in Taurus (April 21st to May 14th) bringing our attention to those things we value, perhaps quite literally our material possessions, property, finances, or income. As Pluto’s evolutionary influence threads through the collective consciousness, the AI arms race accelerates, spewing torrents of misinformation on social platforms. As AI research and tech leaders call in vain for a pause on the AI arms race, data warehousing expert, Dr Barry Devlin adds his voice to a group of concerned industry gurus and warns, “this rapid, profit-driven growth in generative AI which uses as its lexicon the clearly biased, deeply flawed, and completely un-curated corpus of internet text and imagery is a massive, unregulated social experiment.”
AI-generated art, writing, and photography scrapes billions of words and images from the internet without their creators’ knowledge or permission. The mythic-poetic symbolism of this first eclipse of 2023 draws us down into the Underworld of AI-generated deepfakes, a collective social experiment where we face not only ethical concerns, but also the loss of millions of jobs—actors, models and model agencies, artists, writers and photographers, accountants, and teachers, to name but a few, will be obsolete. Writes senior Vox reporter Sara Morrison, “Levi’s will be able to use AI models to show off its gloves, while the rest of us might be thrown into a new world where we have absolutely no idea what we can trust — one that’s even worse than the world we currently inhabit.”
She cautions, “if you see an image of Pope Francis strolling around Rome in Gucci jeans on Twitter, you might want to think twice before you hit retweet.”
At this time of emergence, we may not feel quite ready to emerge, to bravely step onto new ground. But this new Moon is charged with the grace of new beginnings, and we must step cautiously and bravely into an earth that is dying, a new world that is becoming.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke offers these words of encouragement, “fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity.”
The significance of this rare eclipse can only be fully understood in silence. There may be times over the coming months, when we need to unplug from the peremptory dictates of technology and go within. As we stand bare-footed, rooted to the Earth, as we feel the steady presence of a tree, as we hear the sweet song of a river’s flow, we return again to a place of beginning.
Anne Lamott who was born under the sign of the Aries Ram asks “how do you begin? The answer is simple. You decide to.”
Join me for a Midsummer Celebration of Light—June 24th
The Midsummer Solstice is a pivot point in the Great Wheel of the Year. A time of celebration and plenty, a time of magic and mystery, when the veil between the worlds is thin, the Sun is at its Zenith, and the world is infused with Light.
We’ll explore an old Irish story of love and triumph; we’ll attune to the phases of the moon and the best time to be newly creative.
We’ll journey with Eileen Heneghan in a soulful meditation and connect with the Light within.
Join us on Saturday, June 24th, 14.00-15.30.
Price: £20 or EURO 23.
Zoom link will be sent to you via email.
Contact Ingrid Hoffman: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
A slow, attentive light settles on heather-clad hilltops. In steep ravines that slice the coastline into restless waters of the Atlantic, gilded leaves flutter on the invisible breath of autumn winds. This is the month of changing seasons and changing guardians.
Mars Retrograde in Gemini coincided with the financial crisis of the credit crunch and recession of 2007-08 as Pluto entered Capricorn, a poultice that has drawn to the surface all that festers in big business and hierarchical social structures. This sense of dissolution will continue, peaking with the Saturn/Neptune conjunction in Aries in 2025-26.
Wave upon wave of searing heat baked the land this summer. Now a jolt of fiery foliage, burgundy and gold. The rowan and holly are fruiting. The hawthorn bedecked with festive red berries. A false autumn, they say. Nature in shock.
There are six planets moving Retrograde now, drawing us back to shadow energy, the pain body where misunderstandings and the old eye-for-an-eye vibrational energy still linger, and the compelling need now to treat each other kindly, hone our innate capacity for empathic connection, cultivate and nurture enduring friendships, stitch together those bonds of connection that may be frayed or broken. Author Elizabeth Gilbert who has a moon in Virgo, describes our human longing for connection so beautifully, “to be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
Love is fearlessness in the midst of the sea of fear
Venus and Jupiter in Aquarius, meet on February 11th for a sweet caress in the apricot light of dawn. This brief union happens only once a year, yet it carries the promise of serendipitous meetings, joy-filled celebrations, favourable outcomes. For birthdays and weddings, for the fruitful budding of professional or intimate relationships, this day is incandescent. Aquarius encompasses our friendship circle, those anam cara, soul friends, who hold our hands tightly when we’re broken hearted. Mercury in Aquarius, still travelling Retrograde, encounters the sweetness of Venus and the optimism of Jupiter this week, draping our dreams in silken images that sparkle and inspire, offering us an opportunity to re-write the narrative of our lives and move toward “what if” … “what could be”…
wrapped in the sweetness of Love’s beginning is also the sorrow of it’s ending. Anais Nin wrote so poignantly, “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we do not know how to replenish its source.” So how do we replenish Love’s source? David Schnarch writes, love and desire are “not a matter of peeling away the layers but of developing them—growing ourselves up to be mature and resourceful adults who can solve our current problems.”
The Sun enters Pisces on February 18th. In the archetypal journey around the zodiac, we’re invited to wear our mermaid tails and adorn our hair with seashells. Perceptions may shift, new insights may wash to the shore of our consciousness, or ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion may swirl around us as we swim in uncharted waters. In Pisces, we dive deep into opaque waters where music and poetry melt walls that divide. We may experience, in the words of Eckhardt Tolle, “all things that truly matter―beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace―arise from beyond the mind.”
Strong winds and lashing rains wake ancient rivers from their beds, drowning spring’s delicate cameo of white blossoms as they bravely emerge from winter’s lean pragmatism.
Neptune turns a ghostly face to our human need to hold onto what we love. Boundaries dissolve, treasured possessions disappear. We learn that everything is transient. And when we hold on to too tightly, Virginia Woolf reminds us, “buildings fall; even the earth perishes. What was yesterday a cornfield is to-day a bungalow.”
The Sun and the Moon consummate their union with the new Pisces Moon (4° Pisces) February 23rd.
Undines and mythical Mélusines lure us beneath the waves where we can escape from the harshness of our lives by binge-watching Netflix series as the storm clouds hang like bunches of black grapes overhead. Neptune was in Pisces during the Pre-Raphaelite movement and as images of sublime otherworldly beauty captivated the imagination of the elite, the squalor and stench of Les Misérables was portrayed by Victor Hugo.
The corrosive effects of hate-speak and online trolling seep through the porous boundaries of social media while Neptune moves through amorphous Pisces. (2011-2025)
Astrology is a language of metaphor and symbolism that mirrors what emerges in the collective and in our personal lives. We are at a time of collective ending, already glimpsed in extreme weather, the miasma of political machinations, and the endings that precede new beginnings in our own lives. As we widen our circle of compassion, Plato reminds us “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.” 
Pluto stationed direct on October 2nd and the heightened effect may have lingered for a week before and afterwards in our own lives, most certainly in world events. Mercury and Venus entered Scorpio on October 3rd and 8th, and all these planets have aspected the Nodes of the Moon that have been moving across the Cancer/Capricorn axis since 2018. Mars in his own sign of Scorpio, squares the Nodes on October 22nd. Something bigger than ourselves, something fated, is at work. We may remember that for the ancient Greeks, Fate came in the form of three Moirai, those three sisters who determined the Fate of every living creature. It was Atropos who cut the thin thread of life. She decided the end of things. We meet Fate when the Nodes of the Moon transit the planets or angles of our birth chart. The South Node draws us back, into the undertow of the past, we hesitate at the threshold, we circle endlessly in our place of discomfort. The North Node is where we see the diamond of our destiny, although the threshold crossing is never easy. Something is calling us to our purpose, our ability as a race to love and heal and to nurture one another and all creatures great and small.
The New Moon in Scorpio on October 28th makes an edgy opposition to Uranus, indicating that our threshold crossing may not be smooth and sedate. Uranus is associated with sudden shock and upheaval, and when the energies of the Sun and the Moon combine at the New Moon in the sign of the Scorpion, we may discover the truth. We may feel a pressure to release, eliminate, burn on the bonfire those things, those thoughts, those behaviours, that have outlived their purpose.
As summer thrusts sunlight into the receptive hollows of the earth here in the north, and the benediction of winter silence presses into the cold soils of the south, the Sun moves into the sign of Cancer on June 21st and pauses at the threshold in the year. Margaret Atwood reminds us, “This is the Solstice, the still point of the Sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future. The place of caught breath.”
In contrast to the earthy Capricorn knot, all though this year a tidal surge of a very different kind of energy is swirling across the skies as Jupiter, that planet associated with big dreams, grandiosity and faith meets Neptune where we yearn to escape, be rescued from the burnt out ends of our human existence, where we long for romance, ecstatic spiritual experience; yet in real life we do the laundry, walk the dog and come home to relationships that, as John Welwood suggests in his book, 
Venus makes a T-square to the Jupiter/Neptune square June 23rd – 24th to offer us the gift of soul-union with a lover, artistic inspiration, the ability to be selfless, to see the beauty growing out of the cracks in the pavements, the black delta of mould in the subways. It also can signify the tsunami of grief and loss at the ending of a relationship or the realisation that we have been unrealistic or too naïve concerning our finances or what we hold dear to our heart.
Mercury turns Retrograde (4° Leo) on July 8th, stirring up the silt from the shadowy waters of the previous sign of Cancer. We may be prompted to be more introspective, to be mindful of just how we choose to wield our authority, how we bring forth our vision and creativity. As we stand at the Still-Point of the year, may our path be gentle. May we learn to pause and appreciate the simple pleasures, the exquisite beauty, the Love that is all around us.
It arrives suddenly, unannounced, concealed in a swirl of dry wind that scatters a shroud of ash over life as we knew it. It blinds us in the glare of a nuclear sky. Out of the blue, news that buckles our knees, shatters our world into shiny, sharp shards that embed themselves in our heart. At that moment, we know. Our life will never be the same again.
The Sun conjoins Chiron on Wednesday, a suggestion that the road ahead may not be easy. That stiff upper lips and stoicism was not what M Scott Peck had in mind when he said, “Life is difficult.” We may feel flawed; our flame of creativity and passion may be extinguished by worry or sorrow. We may not feel like Xena the Warrior. Chiron pierces through our illusions, our judgements, and in our pain, we may be emboldened by our courage, our inexhaustible vitality.
It takes great courage to submit to the call to visit those secret vulnerable places in our heart, to weep away the pretenses, to risk tenderness.
The Sun in exuberant Sagittarius this month escorts Merry into the days preceding the winter solstice, and the weeks before Christmas deliver an avalanche of excess and indulgence.
The year may be coming to a close now, but we may still be in the midst of a long winter cycle of intensely private grieving. If this is the first, or one of many festive seasons that swirls around the carousel of loss, we may be reminded of the soft presence of the one we have loved. Our heart may ache as the old year ends with such finality. Nostalgia may curl cold fingers around this season of exuberance and joy. The lyrics of a song played in a department store may draw us back to a different time and another place, to a small unmarked grave where a piece of our heart lies buried. We may be gestating a new greening. Or we may heroically be at the zenith of our own personal summer where we resolve to bring our Best Self to the silent spaces in relationships that speak eloquently of pain and disappointment, loss, and longing.
So, let’s go gently as the weeks gather momentum for the crescendo of the solstice on December 21st. Amidst the Christmas carols that loop repetitively from sound systems in shopping malls and supermarkets, the frenetic hurrying to buy what we think our loved ones want. The strenuous exertion, the anticipation, the planning, the doing. Let’s be tender and kind to our weary bodies. In the flurry to buy food, gifts, stocking fillers, ask yourself today what is it I truly need now? Amidst the bright babble of the office party, the fairy lights of the crowded malls, amidst the heated rush of hurry, re-claim a few moments of sumptuous silence in the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath.
Here is my secret. It is very simple: 
