In April 2024 I traveled to Southern Illinois to witness the second total solar eclipse of my life. I hadn’t been there for 6,5 years, but had lived there for nearly ten years prior to my departure in November 2017. Traveling back was my own personal Odyssey. Heaving with grief and shock and the desire to shift the heavy energy and reclaim some of my own history. It was a very painful and profoundly beautiful journey. Something I had to face to heal my own heart.
Most important was seeing my stepson again in real life after too many years of connecting only through video calls, and spending some time with true friends I missed dearly. In August of 2017, when I was still living there, I saw my first total solar eclipse in my then front yard. I was living inside of the full life I had built there. A life that feels to me now like a past life might – a dream lived inside the same body. Ever present, and simultaneously severed from the chapter that came after. It seems like a different timeline. And the cutting of that timeline was a TOTAL LOSS. I still feel the weight and the infinite sadness of leaving everything behind against my will coming through me in waves at times. And yet, it is through that experience, I have also learned to access TOTAL JOY.
Eclipses turn the Earth prematurely dark. The animals go eerily quiet. The birds sing their evening songs. The horizon turns sunset yellow in every direction. It’s like the day dies before the day dies. In the middle of something, in 360°, surrounded by everything ending. In Sufi mysticism this experience is called Fana: A death before you die, to awaken through annihilation into divine unity. Like the diamond of light that breaks through after the darkest point of an eclipse – once witnessed – changes something in you.
Such deaths burn away everything that is false within us. A stripping away of all protective ego-layers and worn-out masks. They leave you with a deep understanding of the TOTALITY of the human experience. Everything. Laid bare. Every heartache and every joy.
So often, people do anything they can to keep heartache at arms length. To not feel the pain. To not feel the discomfort. Not to be faced with devastation. Or our own vulnerability. Our culture is exceptionally well-versed in this movement away from grief. It may very well be the disease of our time. Avoidance. We pop pills. We drink. We distract ourselves. We scroll away. We argue around and around the actual heart of the matter. We overwork. We buy enormous amounts of shit we don’t need. We over consume. We have surface level relationships and walk away when people get too close for comfort. We sometimes even run off to yet another retreat center, just a few more sessions with the most potent psychedelic medicines on the planet, all in the desperate spirit of bypassing the pain.
And it never works. It just flattens life. It flattens connections. Hurts loved ones. And ultimately makes us strangers to ourselves. It prolongs the suffering into an unnecessarily drawn out battle with ourselves. When we could just… feel the thing.
This solar eclipse today is in the sign of Leo, a brave and courageous archetype, ruler of the heart. Leo feels all the feelings, and then rests for a while. At its best, Leo is a remarkably powerful force. Loving and warm, honest and clear. Let this eclipse show you what needs to be seen. Find that feline spirit within you to brave the journey ahead. It will reveal itself when you dare to listen to your own heart. Life isn’t a flatline. Life is cyclical. A pulsating sphere. It holds everything in it. Love it completely, in its unbearably loud totality, and it will love you right back.
To Illinois, a past life, my heart, written in April 2024
We look up and take a vow: To Totality
That means everything
All of it
There is nothing more I ask of you
Know that I've made a home here
Know that I've lived a whole life
On this land
And a whole life away
Know that I've missed you
Know that the body remembers everything
That the air is bigger here and the wind softer
That you can hear a breeze approach from a mile away
Through an ocean of moving trees
That my whole self expanded on these empty roads
Precisely because there was nothing else to do
The emptiness evoking evolution
What else could we have done?
I sat in my front yard weeping and laughing at the sight of Totality back in 2017
I thought I had overcome something at the time
That I had made it through a rough patch of temporary distortion and disorder
But just a few months after that August Sun went dark
The ground fell away from under my feet
This ground
This land
They call it the Heartland
They say gravity is stronger here than other places on Earth
It is heavy like that sometimes
I didn't have the heart to return
But the moon and stars aligned just so
In the backyard of my long loved friends
So I jumped a wave of brave momentum and a beckoning of Solar and Son light
A heart scaffolded by a pillar of trust in the unknown and the principles of courage and closure
I wrote to a friend:
"Illinois has felt like a severed island in my psyche that I simply don't have access to. But that past is also part of me. So perhaps it's really more like a strand in the braid of my life. And I am allowed to weave it back into my own experience"
This presence here is loving and being loved
And when I leave this time -
It's on my own terms
In total resolve and reverence for every life I've lived
And every life still longing to move through me
Metaphysical Mulch 