Celebrating this new blog/plus site, with deep gratitude to local web designer Cristián Uribe, I thought I’d share some reflections on the fourth and final eclipse of 2024.

Whenever you get around to reading this, the annular Solar Eclipse of October 2nd has/had a pattern of fierce beauty about it.  A reckoning, with Grace.  Is a reckoning a kind of fate?  If there is such a thing as Fate, we are free to respond to it in all sorts of ways.  After at least 3,000 years of batting this Fate vs Free Will question around, we may simply be looking at a  very smelly old Red Herring.

Thus, my title.  Choose your own Punctuation.  So, let’s start with the notion that there is a Solar Eclipse Statement being presented to us.  And, let’s say it’s cosmic billboard-sized, like this image of the Zen Archer.  There is a question of universal import here!  How do we,  personally and collectively, take a position on it?  Can we make a meaningful reply?

When the planetary stakes are so very high, when every living being is in the game, how does one individual Archer even participate?  Well you may ask!  Understanding the planets, points and assorted objects in space as archetypal symbols, here’s my enigmatic sense of it all.

Every archetypal element vibrates with its own crystalline structure, frequency, color and sound.  They are all dancing together, just like our solar system.  As they meet and mesh, separate and flow like the interconnecting currents of a river, they are, above all, communicating.  And every artful listener senses that communication in their own  manner.  (It is helpful, in this game of life, if you’re paying attention.)

The elements of the October 2nd New Moon horoscope take the shape of a Zen archery Bow and  Arrow.  In Zen Archery there is no winning or losing.  There is Presence.  How might  we participate with it?   Our breath and focus, our perspective and balance, our meditative willingness are all called forth.

But these aspects are only as strong and supple as our personal rhythm.  Our own resonance, if you will.  We each have an inborn manner of punctuating our lives, our stories.  We are born with a natural tempo, pulse, tenor, gait.  When you put all these characteristics (and more) together, each of us has an absolutely unique expression.  Like our fingerprints.  DNA.  No one else can answer the Archetypes’ overtures with our particular resonance.

This is the time of Call and Response.  The Call has been issued.  Whether you’re enacting  the Zen Arrow or Bow, the Archer or the Target, the moment or the memory, some or all of these—your awareness is your participation.   There’s no sense thinking about it.  Like standing in the CrossRoad, we choose to allow our own Punctuation and the Dream to take us.