Light in August

"And what of the light, this and every August, different from the other months,
no way to explain the precision of its shadows, the warmth of it's brightly lit edges,
the need to show what summer has come to before it ends." WYN COOPER


I love this description of the light in August, written by Wyn Cooper for his article in the summer issue 2002 of Orion magazine.
I am particualry sensitive to the waning light that begins at this time and then quickly accelerates into fall. Every year I, like many others, follow the "warmth of it's brightly lit edges" through September until the end of October, when the curtain of DayLight Savings Time drops and the dark half of the year begins in earnest.
The ancient Celtic peoples believed that autumn actually begins around August 1- I'm sure that this perceptive change in the quality of light informed their sensibility.
Maybe that's why so many of us experience a kind of anxiety and melancholy that is more ancient than our personal memories of returning to school.

Late summer is a time of harvest, of days sung to by cicadas and of nights serenaded by crickets . It is a time of thunderstorms with its life-giving lightning.
Did you know that lightning is one of only 2 ways that nitrogen is fixed naturally in the soil?
Aparently, all life requires a particular kind of nitrogen in order to live.
The bonds in nitrogen need to be broken to create amino acids, which later become the protein building blocks of life.
Says Michael Pollan in his book THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA:
"The electrical shock of lightning breaks these bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility."

The taoist Chinese, like many indigenous peoples, recognized this quality .
In the I CHING for Thunder, SHAKE/SHAKE, Stephen Karcher writes:

"A disturbing and fertilizing shock; wake up, frighten, arouse, inspire, break through , put into movement, tremble.
The ideogram portrays rain and the sign for exciting.
This is a burst of new energy. Rouse things up to new activity. Re-imagine things - let this shake up your old habits. When it first comes the shock can be frightening. Then joy and laughter soon follow."

Here in Colorado, we had thunderstorms almost every day and it was unusually cool and wet for a place that is largely high-plateau desert. Many times I'd get caught in a rain touched by thunder and knew it to be a blessing. Walking along after one of these brief storms, I smelled buttescotch with hints of vanilla and traced it to the bark of a ponderosa pine tree.
This has been a delicious albeit strange summer.

If awe is one of the deep responses evoked by flashes of lightning in the darkness, then the sudden loss of daylight during an eclipse of the sun is also one of the most breath-taking events we can ever witness.

Let's imagine then, what it might be like to see such an eclipse, sitting on a hillside somewhere waiting....
As the disc of the moon begins to slide across the face of the sun, an enormous shadow rolls across the land at terrifying speed and then you are hit by a wall of darkness that plunges everything into sudden night.
Birds stop singing, insects cease moving and an eerie silence settles in as stars appear overhead.
And for 6 long, strangely hushed minutes, you and the rest of creation hold its breath waiting for the return of the light and the familiar day-world we call 'normal'.
But yet... what could ever feel normal again after an experience like that ?
Perhaps this visualization gives you some sense of the impact of eclipses have on the psyche.
For you who were attuned and thus deeply affected by those that occured this summer, you know exactly what I mean.

The watery, imaginative, emotional dynamics of the summer solstice were followed by three eclipses; two lunar and one solar.
The total eclipse of the sun which happened on July 21st was the longest eclipse in a century.
It occured on the second new moon in Cancer, the first being the day after the summer solstice.
2 new moons in one sign is unususal and indicates the need for resolving issues associated with that sign. Cancer is the first of the water signs and deals with the most primal emotions evoked in meeting our most basic needs for nourishment, safety, connection through touch, and a vital sense of belonging, often first satisfied through our mothers and families of origin.
Oohhh.... those issues again.....


Eclipses constellate deeply felt if not dimly understood reactions that portend a change in our emotional evolution. Depending on where this eclipse occured in your chart, it speaks to big changes in your capacity to feel and to process emotionally charged information.
This process will affect us for the next 18 months, and gives each one of us unique instructions for how to weather the astrological storm that's brewing later this fall.
And we don't have to wait long for a forecast because from Sept. 6th to Sept. 29th, we will be in a Mercury retrograde that will give us some indication of what's in store.

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