The Taurus-Scorpio Eclipses of May 2022

Better late than never. The eclipses firing off on the axis of Scorpio and Taurus have already begun, but we’re in the midst of them now for a whole year so I might as well give my two cents. The next series is due in about 6 months, with the Lunar Eclipse dropping smack on my 36th birthday in November, so I’m deep in with these. All eclipses open portals, as they say—what does that mean exactly? It means doors that were not budging, or paths you dreamed of taking musingly, ‘one day,’ suddenly open up. This happens through a series of implosions that you did not expect, for we always have a lot of unconscious deluge in the way of our deepest wants, a sort of string of hot rocks to walk over of our own placing, a river of self-sabotage to skitter across. The eclipses for a time whether it be by the blocked out sun or the covered moon cool this pathway so that it can be taken. You can make huge leaps in many areas of your life by just rolling gently with the waves that eclipses create. Resisting utterly around the liminal eclipse period—the two weeks between Solar and Lunar Eclipses (which just occurred last between April 30 and May 16)—will create a sickening stagnation in your life, a kind of total death, in which renewal doesn’t seem possible and all kinds of morbid fears wreak havoc.

While all Eclipses are portals of that nature, the ones hinging onto Scorpio particularly have to do with death and what needs to be let go. Morbidity, as I see it, really occurs from digging in one’s heels and not rolling with the Life/Death/Life cycles. For example, getting morbid about food can mean continually gorging yourself, suffering indigestion, weight gain, slowness, fatigue—morbidity slows, cramps, eventually kills—that’s what’s so scary about it and why morbidity exists in presentiments, in unconscious symbols of decay, compulsions, and backlashes, but at the root of it is really just an attitude, and that can always be shifted. So to see one’s morbidity clearly wherever that is is the lesson of the current Eclipse period, and by Fall it’s going to give way to something much deeper for those who are doing the work now. For me, well I’m a double Scorpio, and I’ve been waiting for this time. So far, it’s slammed down hard on my own worth and my most basic rhythms, my body, and the work I want to do—I was working in landscaping in which at best I was mediocore, and not only that I was injuring my body continuously and pushing myself beyond what I could handle on the regular, and for years. That’s what this eclipse imploded for me. I walked away, and here I am now, writing to y’all.

Things are always dying in us, in our bodies, and around us, and flowing with it is part of making graceful this dance of life. For to give way to the death you feel coming on means that the energy then gets transformed—health re-emerges, knowingness flashes upon us, and joy. That’s what it’s really about—joy can’t arise out of stagnation, it’s why the third piece cake for example brings only upset—you’ve got to build yourself up to another release, and then break down, and then—with the curiosity of a child, look here, uncover there, throw yourself in there, till you ignite again. And eclipses abruptly shift people’s cycles—so that if you’ve been avoiding the come down, you find yourself suddenly deep in it, or sometimes it works the opposite way, an unbelievable amount of joy and ecstasy and a feeling of being in the right place rips in upon you. Eclipses may be occurring for everyone at once, but they strike deeply on an individual level too, at whatever plateau of evolutionary consciousness you happen to be stuck at. They don’t hit everyone the same, but eventually your number gets called. Then they seethingly, like a dog with its fangs bared, require that you go with your instinct and your gut—now. If some sense of false security had been holding you in place, the Eclipse abruptly shines a light on it so you cannot unsee the falseness of it—your frailty, your own hesitance, and the way you’ve stagnated.

Scorpio and Taurus rule protection of the body and the conscious pulling up or letting down of boundaries. So the liminal period begun on April 30 put protection temporarily on hold, creating hysterical situations in which people felt unsafe, in which rugs of security were pulled out from underneath, in which love affairs became out of control, and even steady relationships lost their grounding. But if anything is becoming twisted up and ‘lost,’ then it was only a temporal situation anyway. Relationships originate at the soul level and must sometimes return, becoming untethered or freed of the material world. Just like individuals, a relationship between two people survives by rolling with life and death cycles and always becomes stronger after two people decide to stick to each other through major transitions, especially when material security is at stake or temporarily sacrificed. But then security shifts into the esoteric or the spirit and becomes less privy to the winds of cycle. The Scorpio-Taurus eclipses are deepening the pressure with which everyone presses their feet to the earth, and spinning hurricanes at our relationships. They’re tearing through once and won’t be seen again for many years, so we’re not always or even very often due for such a pruning. The ethos of Taurus is of the solid man and woman, surrounded by his or her hearth, and the ethos of Scorpio is the act of risking it all for love, the burning of the essence, and the transformation of the hearth after a period of scarcity and trial which ultimately creates overflowing abundance, and a joint mutually supportive life. Some of us will lose our relationships at this time, too, and if that is the case—then there is more, something deeper and more grounded waiting unseen.

Wherever you’re at, I hope that end of May finds you all in the arms of sweet grief, laughing at what’s beginning to blossom around you. There are many little deaths in life, but they only make us aware of how precious our time is, and how far we’ve come.