The Shift

On that day, nothing happened...and everything happened.  

I'm struggling to find words to explain the profound, the simple, the prevailing, the sublime. It was a total eclipse of the heart in the most brilliant and beautiful way.  Nothing like Bonnie Tyler's experience. It was my own.

It started as a normal, beautiful April day in the Midwest.  Blue skies, warm air and the welcome brilliance of a sun that had been hidden for days by clouds and thunder, rain and gray.  I was hopping, coming off an intense few weeks of pervasive low-level anxiety, shadow processing and a recent plunge back into a deep well of energies from my childhood.

I was hoping, ready for something miraculous to happen.  I was ready for the world to change.  I'm so naive that way.  But I do it, again and again.  One day I'll be right...or I won't.  It doesn't really matter to me.  I was happy.  Supremely happy that morning because "the big day" was finally here. 

My main task for the day was to get groceries and get back home before the peak of the eclipse.  I wanted to make sure that I was able to see this historic event since I was well within the zone and I wanted to be safe and sound at home, just in case some incredible earth event or social unrest or something crazy like that erupted.  I had, after all, pulled the Death card as the "situation" card in a tarot reading I did back in NC when I was making a decision for my April travel plans.  I wasn't sold on the fact that death would come upon me or the event, but it was enough to caution me to stay away, even if only to avoid the long lines of traffic that I did hear tell of as a warning before the eclipse, and as a report after.  

At the top of my shopping list was fresh, organic fruits and vegetables.  Greenville, my hometown, has only one grocery store and that grocery store had only 2 fresh organic choices, blueberries and spring mix of which I bought both.  Surprisingly they did have organic kombucha and kimchi which I also purchased for my daily healthy gut flora requirements.  Yum!  The closest, best place for me to get a variety of fresh organic fruits and vegetables was in a town 20 miles away.  So, I crated the dog, grabbed my coffee and headed to Vandalia.

Aldi is a very basic shopping experience, but since they are a European owned company, they offer quite a large variety of affordable organic and non-gmo products.  At 10 am, I was happy to be getting wholesome food.  I was grateful for a car to borrow and coffee to drink and I was just feeling so good. So very good.  I loaded up the cart with plenty of food because I needed it, and just in case we wouldn't be able to shop again for a few weeks because of this Eclipse event. (Remember the toilet paper shortage in 2020?  I do.) 

I got up to the checkout counter, unloaded all of my groceries, and reached into my bag for my wallet.  I searched in my bag for my wallet.  I fumbled through my bag for my wallet.  It was not there.  Ha!  This was precious, truly precious.  I didn't even get upset in the least, in fact, for me it was just another sign that this was a very special day.  This was happening to me for a very specific reason.  I asked them to please hold my cart aside while I went back to get my wallet.  I went out to the car and started to drive.

I won't bore you with the rest of the details of this little experience except to say that I felt the magic of the eclipse setting in.  I was full of joy.  Simply radiating even as I drove back and forth.  It was a meditative experience for me almost.  People were so kind and beautiful towards me.  So many precious, simple exchanges occurred.  I continued to become more grateful, and everything seemed so brilliant, so purposeful, so beautiful.  Everything was perfectly as it should be.  

And as I was driving back down the highway, only a mile from my parents' home, car safely full of provisions, the darkness of the eclipse began setting in behind me.  I left the groceries to be unloaded after, grabbed the special glasses and headed outside to watch.  The shadow of the moon spilled down around us.  It was now around 1: 45.  Our peak coverage was at 2:02pm CST.  I was grateful.  

I wanted to absorb as many of the beautiful energies of the event as I possibly could.  I longed for some grounding.  So, I grabbed the blanket off my dog's crate and laid it in the grass in my parents' front yard.  I took off my socks, laid flat on my back, staring up at the sun (yes with my little eclipse glasses on so I wouldn't go blind, but I did peek at the sun without the glasses, probably just to be a rebel...and I didn't go blind).

I put my bare feet and naked hands in the grass.  I became still, watching the darkness return to the full light of the sun.  I felt the love of mother earth and father sun pouring though me. Like a celestial Kama Sutra, the brilliance of their love illumined me.

I must say, it has been a truly life altering shift that has occurred within me.   I'm not sure if it comes more from the transformative energies of the eclipse that everyone was chattering about pre-Monday afternoon's event, or if it is a product of the healing meditations course I started the Sunday night before the eclipse, and/or a bit of both. 

I must say there was even a special, collective buzz, not of fear, but of excitement for this historic event, here where I was in Illinois.  I participated in a trivia fundraising event last Saturday night for the local library and the theme of the evening was, you guessed it...The Solar Eclipse.  They had special t-shirts made and the local ice-creamery had a special flavor called Eclipse (It was delicious.  Blueberry with dark chocolate swirls.  Yum again.) 

Non-astrologers, non-woo woos, farmers even, got the glasses and made their way to the places where totality was forecasted.  Here where I was, we still had 99.6% coverage at the peak.   

It is a day that I will remember not just because of the visual beauty of the eclipse itself, but because of the energies of that celestial event that have moved through me and are moving through me still.

The anxiousness, the worry I felt coming into the event, are non-existent in me now.  I feel an opening of opportunities.  Synchronicities are showing up for me.  I feel supremely safe and protected.  I feel perfectly content with every element of my life, what is and what is to come.  It's all perfect.  It's all as it should be.  

My total eclipse of the heart has left me with an expanding love for everything that is and was and is to come.  My world has shifted. Profoundly. Can you feel it too?