There will be a lunar eclipse on Tuesday morning starting at 1:30 am and continuing on to 5:30 am. This event falls on the shortest day of the year; the winter solstice. These two natural occurances have not coincided for 456 years. Just as I mentioned in this forum on December 8, there has been a long standing battle between the sun and the moon that is well documented in folklore. On this night, the sun will actually try to obliterate the moon with the help of the earth. A mighty battle happening quietly in the night sky.
Luckily, we pretty much know what the outcome will be. But imagine the ancients who wondered if the world was ending as the days grew shorter and shorter and shorter. Add to that, how alarming it must have been to watch the full moon disappear in one night.
It's good to take in the larger scheme of things. It puts us in our place. We are such tiny specks here on Earth. Powerful beyond imagining it turns out, but tiny just the same.
1 comment:
A battle in the skies, yes. But there's another way of seeing it too: An even larger harmony transcending even these skies, in which the dark and light are always in flux, ever changing, rotating. In our lives and relationships these eclipses happen too: within ourselves various "rooms" within us crowd out others in a flow, and between two people there are eclipses, partial and full as well. These are all events in a continuum. My prayer is that the patterns in our public life leave the harsh conflict vision and move toward the bigger concerns that face us all. Hope for clear skies indeed.
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