March Full Moon Details
The March Full Moon, aka the Full Worm Moon, occurs in Libra on 23 March at 7:01 AM Central time here in the Florida Panhandle. The Eclipse–more details below–begins at 4:39 AM on 23 March, hits its maximum at 6:47 AM, and ends at 8:54 AM. As a penumbral lunar eclipse, it will be subtle rather than dark and blood red and can be seen in North America, Australia, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, Arctic, Antartica, and in most of Asia and South America. The Eclipse occurs at 3 Libra 17, for which the Sabian symbol is:
Around a campfire, a group of young people sit in spiritual communion.
This Full Moon Eclipse, I feel, is all about…making connections with those who support us and finding that dreamy, idealistic quality we feel in any new relationship or new way of thinking. This is almost the feeling of a new social movement, innocent and idealistic, coming together in unison to figure out how to smooth out the jagged edges of all the turbulence around us.
Libra, an air sign, is generally about partnerships, beauty, harmony, balance, a refined sense of being. This particular full moon is a shot of dreaminess amid all the conflicts around us, particular political and world tensions. If you’re at all empathic, you’ve probably been feeling the raw edginess all around you, as though something is about to burst wide open. This moon has Venus (love, romance, money, creativity) in conjunction–should shall we say in partnership?–with Neptune (mysticism, uncertainty, magic, spirituality, deception). That conjunction is a lovely dreamy quality against the larger background of stress, in particular the Uranus-Pluto (upsets, regeneration, blowing things apart) square and a Jupiter-Saturn (expansion vs contraction) square that I equate to a struggle between holding together and bursting apart.
You can choose to focus on the wide-scale ugliness in the news and in the political arena of this election year, or you can look at the idealistic part of yourself you may have forgotten and perhaps connect with others who welcome that idealism and are willing to help you solidify those hopes and dreams.
March Full Moon Meditation
For those of you who remember the meditations I’ve written before, you know how this works. I share this unraveling of images and you’re welcome to use what makes sense to you. You may wait and read the meditation for the first time when you’re ready to meditate on this scenario or you may prefer to read it, mull it over, and use it as the basis for your own meditation. It does not have to be done at the Full Moon and is appropriate for any time you feel led to use it.
You are vaguely aware that you are tumbling, head and knees tucked in, down a grassy hill. You curl yourself into a tight ball to keep from getting bruised, and eventually you roll to a sprawling stop. You stay still, tucked in as much as possible, quietly assessing the damage from your tumble, feeling the lush grass under your fingertips.
Where you’ve been has not been kind to you. You still bear the scars, the bruises. Everything around you that you trusted, the world you’d built…it’s all gone now, behind you. It no longer fits with where you want to go or who you want to be.
You keep your eyes closed, so afraid you are that the turbulence ahead of you will be worse than the turbulence behind you. There are things you no longer believe, dreams you no longer dream.
Then you realize that all is quiet and still. You are alone. Whatever broken dreams you left behind are truly left behind, and not even those dreams accompany you now. There is a sense of transition, of starting over but not there yet, of wanting to remember who you were and what you wanted before you were shown and lost it.
Slowly you open your eyes to find that as you have fallen, so has night. All around you is pitch black. Slowly your eyes become accustomed to the stars, and you recognize the North Star.
In the pale light of the bowl of heaven, you discern dark woods in front of you. Behind you is the steep hill and no going back. Before you loom dark trees, moss swaying on branches that stretch to the ground and hide the shadows behind their leaves. You can follow the North Star, not to reach your unknown destiny but to keep from going in circles, and so you climb to your feet and take a step forward, into the woods, showing no fear. You’ve walked through many a wood, and this one should be nothing any different.
You walk a while, looking up at the North Star to guide you, but the trees become thicker until you can no longer see the stars through the branches. You are not quite lost but you are unsure of your steps, your direction, of what is around you.
For a moment, you think that you will panic but then you hear singing deep in the woods. You step tentatively at first, then more quickly, hands in front of you in case you should fall. You stumble here and there but follow the sound. The voices and words become clearer: “It only takes a spark to get a fire going,” you hear. The voices are young, half-man, half-child and half-woman, half child. More than two. More than 5. They sing in chorus.
The sound becomes clearer as you draw nigh the singers. You move silently between the trees and a campfire comes into view. You see shadows of singers in a circle around the fire, and as they sing the fire grows into a bonfire that seems to breathe and grow the more they sing, raising it from a campfire to a bonfire.
One of the faces in the red glow sees you. She nods to the others, and the song breaks off. The circle breaks. The fire dies from bonfire to campfire.
The young singer is just shy of adulthood, but starry eyed, hopeful, wistful in a way you can barely remember. So are the faces of the other singers. You can feel their sense of union–with Deity, with each other, with themselves. There is a feeling of belonging and rightness and crafting the most beautiful world. You long for this oneness with something greater than yourself. You long for their company. You long for communion with self.
Then the young singer smiles at you and extends her hand. “Come,” she says. “We’ve been waiting of you.” She gestures to the others, the fire, the woods, the stars shining through above. “All of us, we’ve been waiting for you.”
She points to two tall poles on either side of the campfire, with a thick rope stretched between the polls, spelling out something in curling rope, but you cannot read it in the glimmer of firelight. It is a word, waiting to be set on fire in the sky, but the campfire is too thin.
She pulls you into the circle and begins to sing again. “It only takes a spark to get a fire going….”
The others join her song, smiling at you, welcoming you, sharing their vision. This feels like you. You feel welcome here. You know their vision because it’s your vision, too. You complete the circle and join their song. Your song. This feels right.
With the rise in your voices, the flames grow. The campfire swirls upward into a bonfire, flames licking at the work in rope between the two tall poles. As your voices rise and rise and rise, your chest heaving as you sing with all your breath, knowing all the words and all the harmonies, the bonfire shoots skyward and lights the word.
The spark starts at one end, the first letter, and spreads across all four to spell L-O-V-E.
A hush falls on the circle as the song ends. The bonfire falls to crackling cinders and the smoke and memory of the word is burned in the sky above you. Together you have sent your desires heavenward, working together with your tribe, with those who welcome you and understand you. You breathe it in, all of it, this feeling of oneness and the efforts of others joined with yours. You hold the hands of the singers on either side of you. The circle is not unbroken.
With a fullness in your heart, you begin to sing again.
Key Takeaway: Everything falls into place seamlessly, let the universe align the stars for you.
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