Of eclipses, identity, hockey, dads and me

We’re closing in on the last of three powerful eclipses within one month, and every astrology site on the Internet has been buzzing with the same call: “Let go of what no longer serves you! Embrace who you came here to be!” It’s dramatic and exciting; for some it’s intimidating and terrifying; some take up the call to allow change obsessively; and for some the transformations at hand are subtle and seem to come out of nowhere — and it can be hard to tell if they stick. For sure, however, in each case a shift is occurring.

With one eclipse left to go, I’m not going to predict where I’m going to end up. But I would like to describe where I am along my arc at the moment. What I can say is that the phase between the first two eclipses had a certain flavor, a theme shared — bizarrely enough — with the professional sports teams and fans of a certain New England city. Granted, the theme of releasing an old identity has played out a bit differently for the Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins than it has for me. But try as I might to separate the threads, certain points of contact seem to keep them irrevocably intertwined.

You see, just after the total lunar eclipse conjunct the Galactic Core on June 15, the Boston Bruins won North America’s pro hockey championship trophy, the Stanley Cup. It was their first Cup in 40 years, since the 1972 team featuring Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito thrilled New England hearts, despite a record 29 consecutive playoff appearances ending in the mid-‘90s.

I’m a bit of a lapsed hockey fan, I hate to admit, but I’ve never lacked love and loyalty for my ‘home’ teams in baseball and hockey. Throughout my childhood, the Boston Red Sox served as one of several points of contact between my dad and me. He was never a ‘fanatic’, but appreciated the game, as well as the team he adopted after moving to Maine. Both of us could be transported by the thought of long-time Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione calling a game to the memory of warm summer evenings in the car with my family. Driving home from my Italian great-uncle’s summer cottage, the air was full of crickets and lightning bugs and the smell of the earth radiating the Sun’s heat back into the night, underlaid with the knowledge that as much as we wanted to believe this would be “their year,” our hearts would get broken yet again.

In fact, I would say heartbreak became almost a ritual for fans of Boston baseball and hockey; more than just a tendency, it was a bit like a second religion. The Red Sox ended their own 86-year championship drought in 2004. Perhaps significantly, they also won the final game of that World Series the night of a total lunar eclipse.

That was a season that finally convinced me of the power of collective attitude and belief in allowing desire to manifest. It gave me a taste of what it’s like to allow the current moment to be the only thing that is real, letting the past and future fall out of focus. I spoke to the TV screen urging the pitcher just to just get this pitch; just this pitch; it’s all that exists, as the team impossibly came back from a three-to-none playoff series deficit to get to the World Series. I know — there are far more ‘spiritual’ ways to experience these things according to many. But that year, I found it in baseball — and so did others, including a best friend who professed to hate sports but who, like me, found herself calling her dad as soon as the last out was called.

My Dad, however, was not really into hockey. That was something introduced to me by a friend in high school, and of which I became a true fan when I met my first college boyfriend. Watching games on TV and in person with his friends, I became ‘one of the guys’ as we shouted over impossible goals, heartbreaking saves and bone-crushing hits.

A few years after college, I found myself in relationships with men who were not quite so die-hard in their hockey fandom (or simply didn’t care at all). I found myself lacking the easy way into the game: on the coattails of those in my immediate company, fueled perhaps by a bit of codependence and a tendency to locate my sense of self in a relationship. I still enjoyed the game when I ran across it, but my attention was generally too focused elsewhere to make an effort — my interest apparently part of an emotional matrix with too many other factors. Familiar players left the team, taking another point of contact with them; five years ago I stopped living with a TV (and a partner) altogether, extending the drift.

I’d gotten hints that this might be a year to tune back in to the Bruins back in April, when a fellow actor informed me they were in the playoffs and had just dug deep to escape elimination in the first round. I was intrigued and excited, but far too caught up in my personal themes of the previous six months: grounding myself back in my life here in Portland after a year of racing around the countryside to visit my long-distance lover; finally saying “yes” to more theater than I had done in the past three years combined; responding positively to forces pushing me to grow professionally and creatively; trying to get the hang of compersion as my lover took space to explore himself instead of exploring me — or so it seemed at first. It turns out we’ve been exploring each other after all, as well as ourselves, but that branch of the story deserves its own essay — or several. In other words, the past three seasons had been very full, and they were part of two dynamic years I never could have predicted — and which are now opening into ever-more new territory.

Now here we are in June 2011 on the other side of a pair of eclipses that urged us to let go of past patterns to make room for new ones and to connect more deeply to Source. And despite my typical sense that “I’m not doing enough!” I think a shift is making itself evident. At the very least, the last few weeks have been filled with synchronicity and auspicious dreams.

For one, in response to a mass email I sent out June 1 warning of a phishing scam, I found myself in conversation with my Bruins-loving college ex for the first time in years. That relationship was my first serious one, with the wonderful adventure of first sex, but the legacy of its ending was, in part, more than a decade of sexual dysfunction — something I finally began to unravel five years ago. That June 1 South Node eclipse in Gemini also brought a trio of run-ins with another ex a couple of nights later. He was the one with whom I watched that 2004 Red Sox World Series — complete with its own eclipse — and the one who catalyzed the road to sexual healing I just mentioned when he decided to end a seven-and-a-half-year relationship five years ago.

This gave me a strong, if impressionistic, sense of some of the mental patterns I might be working out in those two weeks between eclipses. I sensed they had to do with my perceptions in past relationships, my identity in relationships and my sexuality. But I wasn’t sure what I needed to do with the process. A few days after that first eclipse, I visited my lover at his home for the first time in seven months and then left him to his weekend date with another woman. This opened a door to a deeper aspect of my eclipse journey: the angle where my tendencies toward codependency, toward locating my self in relationships, and insecurity intersect with my desires to practice compersion, to love myself, and to find security in my core (that elusive ‘spiritual’ connection to Source) — all as a part of sexual wholeness.

The morning after I returned home, June 12, I awoke to realize I had had the most astonishing dream. The symbolism was so obvious and literal I had to laugh: escaping a hotel room where I was being held captive; leaving behind my driver’s license and passport while barefoot; exiting through the front door (inexplicably the guards were gone) instead of sneaking out the side or back, assisted by a friend and former lover whose Sagittarius Sun is conjunct my Moon; and running into a former coworker whose last name is “Freeman” in an open field. Before I was even fully awake, I knew the dream was about letting go of a past identity and leaving behind this former sense of self, baring my soul (soles) in order to finally be free. My Moon conjunct the Galactic Core was finally getting the boost it needed to reach out past a difficult natal aspect.

And yes, I think this all manages to connect to the Bruins winning the Stanley Cup June 15. Because, after all, one thing Boston fans have been suffering (and had even more so with the Red Sox) is a stuck sense of identity, married to agony. The mental pattern of presuming loss before the end — while simultaneously cheering a team on — is not only counter-productive, it’s downright seductive in its promise to soften the blow when the inevitable happens.

It doesn’t work.

In fact, it makes things worse, guaranteeing heartbreak — just like how, in an effort to ease the pressure of expectation, warning my prospective lovers that they shouldn’t expect a sexual response never actually made things easier for anyone. In the long run, that just guaranteed heartbreak too. Sure, it’s a relief in its own way — there’s nothing left to lose. But losing isn’t the worst of things. Not living is.

Death and release, loss and gain; they come in many forms. We don’t always see them for what they are, though I think the lunar eclipse conjunct the Galactic Core, while darkening the skies, let some light shine in from deep space to some souls who have needed dearly to see it, feel it, connect with it and travel in it. My friend Tim, one of the “guys” I was one of while watching Bruins games in college, lost his dad suddenly several years ago. He had been a man so passionate about the Boston Bruins, he literally could not watch close playoff games as the clock counted down, instead retreating to the porch until the last minutes were done. Tim was one of my first friends to lose a parent, and two years ago June 24 when my own father died, I knew he was one of my few peers to truly understand.

Late at night on June 15, as I scrolled through the Internet and Facebook trying to soak up some of the Bruins’ euphoria vicariously, I saw Tim’s simple post, which said all there really was to say: “You can come in off the porch now Dad. They did it.”

Come in off the porch now, said this eclipse — to me, to the Bruins, to Tim’s anxious dad, to all of us. See clearly that which no longer serves you, release it and come home to yourself. Be free.