The Monstrous Liberation of Eclipses

Plus: Dates for Live Chats in Apr-Jun 2025

Business first. Here are the dates for Live Chats in the coming three months:

• Sunday, April 13, 2pm EDT

• Sunday, May 18, 2pm EDT

• Sunday, June 22, 2pm EDT

Topics for each Chat will be released closer to the dates.

An eclipse as seen from my terrace in Brooklyn.

Monstrous Eclipses

Eclipses have traditionally been occasions of anxiety due to their shape-shifting, monstrous qualities. The moon turns blood red. The sun disappears behind a shadow and an eerie, silent chill settles over the land. Birds fall silent. Horses whinny. We are told (both seriously and in memes) to avoid the eclipse’s “baleful rays.”

Without casting any shade (pun intended!) on traditional interpretations of eclipses, I would suggest that there is more to eclipse season than simply figuring out how to best “manage” the astrology.

Eclipses are HOLY moments, for they demonstrate to us the undeniable truth that we are always already at the mercy of the cosmos, which is to say, of each other.

In a cosmos that is alive and inter-woven and constantly in dynamic tension, there is no way to separate “light” from “dark,” “Sun” from “Moon,” “you” from “me.” We are all already interconnected, all already interpenetrated both by what we label “good” and what we label “bad.”

It’s easy in times like these to see how we are constrained (or even harmed or killed) by these interweavings: How a grandmother in Ukraine or Gaza loses her last grandchild to a drone-strike because of the words spoken by an oligarch thousands of miles away. Or how a drug-addled billionaire’s rocket-fueled whims can result in the sky literally raining debris on residents of Caribbean islands.

It’s much harder, however, to discern in the outlines of the monster, a figure of liberation. But that’s exactly the capacity we need to develop in ourselves at this moment, as my brother and teacher Báyò Akómólafé has repeatedly pointed out.

A screenshot of a little doodle I made recently. The little snake-dude in the corner is my rendering of the Orphic deity “Protogonos.”

A Probing Question & a Hot Take

One of my favorite “hot takes” from Bayo is his question,

“What if the way we are responding to the crisis is PART OF THE CRISIS?”

He first posed it a number of years ago — before the current US administration, before the pandemic, before much of the world had woken up to the fact that there is no clean and clear way out of this mess.

But what struck me at the time was that the point he was making was not defeatist. It was incredibly liberating.

The times we are facing are truly monstrous, he said. And yet… and yet…

What possibilities would be opened up for imagining new ways of being if we admitted that we were always already monstrously half-human, half-“other”?

If the “the human” was always already cross-contaminated with the land, the sky, the animal, mineral, and vegetable?

If the very idea of discrete identities (of humans, of animals, even of rocks and skies and stars) is false?

What if framing our problems in terms that fail to acknowledge the radical truth of complete and utter interdependent becoming —what if that framing is itself part of the problem?

My recent trip to the “Orphism in Paris” exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. It was my first time using a wheelchair in public!

Orphism and “Crip” Ways of Being

The Orphics posed this question in their hymns and rituals over 2500 years ago. I now dedicate my life to uncovering and translating their ancient wisdom, trying to loosen the decades of humanist conditioning that has me thinking of “myself” as separate from the cosmos.

I’m helped in this de-conditioning by my position as a disabled person (aka a “crip”), someone whose life has been irreparably and undeniably altered by a virus that cohabitates with “me” in my very cells. The sores on my lips, the vertigo in my head, my racing heartbeat whenever I stand: all are “inner” reminders of my interdependence with my most intimate of companions, SARS-CoV-2.

In the “outer” world, there are likewise reminders of my interdependence: the barometric pressure changes of storms and the havoc they wreak on my body, as well as the relief brought to my lungs by the ionization of the sea air, to name just two.

But at this time of year, eclipses remind me not to just think of my monstrous disability as a limitation. As holy moments when categories of light/dark, sun/moon, day/night melt into each other and re-combine, eclipses remind me to pause and reflect on how I can lean into the monstrous possibilities of my own un-becoming.

As I become more dependent on other humans, on plants and pharmaceuticals, on various mobility aids, on local air quality and continent-spanning barometric pressure systems, I discover new ways to live into the reality of cosmic “inter-being” that it was possible, as an able-bodied person, to ignore.

The following truth is now undeniably, sometimes even painfully clear to me:

We are all always already living, dying, and being re-born. Together. Inseparable from the All.

A Practical Suggestion

I can think of no better eclipse season remediation than to ditch whatever hand-wringing “take” you are currently doom-scrolling about (astrological or political), and read this amazing essay by Bayo. Over the next few days, ruminate on what it would mean for all of us (including the other-than-human) if we were to start living in its truth.

Bayo’s work is a gift to us all, especially those of us who have somewhat inchoate longings to lose ourselves in reverence to Earth and Starry Sky.

Have a wonderfully monstrous, liberating eclipse.

Orphically yours,

✨✨Kristin