The full moon lunar eclipse this Friday: the mother

It’s the Sagittarius full moon lunar eclipse on Friday and I am certainly feeling the heat. Phew. Not only am I literally burning hot from having spent a little bit too much time in the sun today, but the fire within me has been ignited a little bit more with news of what a return to pre-school will likely entail for my three year old, Eben.

We have already made the decision to home school Elijah, our six year old, for the rest of this term and then take a view on this in September, but I had intended to settle Eben back into pre-school, as he is a very different child to Elijah, much more sociable and in need of constant entertainment, he is a vortex of energy, this having kicked his way out of me six weeks early on the supermoon back in October 2016! He hasn’t stopped kicking and running and moving and generally challenging me, and yet delighting me with his zest and passion for living and life, ever since.

The eldest is super sensitive and has never truly been conformable with school, there was constant tears and I have been picking up for lunch for the last two years because he hates the noise of the playground and gets anxious with all the other children. Returning to school now, after a three month absence, with all the changes and the social distancing and the constant hand washing, just wouldn’t be healthy for him, it takes him a good while to adjust to new situations and he’s gotten used to being at home, and to be honest his learning has improved with the one to one attention.

Pre-school though, I thought I’d be OK with that, until we received the communication today about the changes to procedures. After being assured back in September that parents were able to stay and help settle their children, now we have to drop and leave as quickly as we can. I know only too well how traumatic this can be to a child if they are not ready for it, I’ve blogged about it before, but we foolishly did this with Elijah back in the day, as everyone told us this was the way, only to return three hours later to find a shaking and sobbing two and three quarter year old.

We did it again, twice, because we kept being told you had to do it, until we realised this wasn’t right. He started getting anxious at night, his behaviour changed, he clung to me, he cried as we drove to pre-school, he virtually begged me. It wasn’t until the last full moon last month that i finally forgave myself for that, almost four years on. It was almost unforgivable as a mother to just leave your crying child with a total stranger, and dash off, when that child has never been left with anyone other than family and does not know a single person in the rooms and can’t stand noise! He was traumatised.

So I won’t be repeating that mistake with Eben. Not that he will get the opportunity as he has a persistent cough, has done for about three weeks now. Apparently there is a persistent cough on Guernsey, I think people have been fretting they have Covid and contacting the health care professionals accordingly, so it’s become more well known that it’s not Covid, that there is another virus with similar symptoms circulating. So until Eben no longer coughs, and no longer has a snotty nose, which might also be some time as he is three years old and many children have snotty noses, it’s the Kapha, part of the period of their life that they are in, then he won’t be returning to pre-school.

If he does go, they’ll be taking the children’ temperature on arrival, which is not part of the public health advice and does seem to go a little far for me, but is part of their risk management strategy. I do wonder what kind of world we are wanting our children to grow up in and I’ll be honest, the way things are going currently, this is absolutely not the way I would like the world to become, with us being totally paranoid about germs, to the extent that children will become anxious at the slightest hint of them, and also won’t be exposed to them impacting on their immune systems when they are exposed to them and what of OCD around cleanliness and cleaning the hands.

Today we also found out that the States are trying to get children off the bus and on the road, with walking or cycling the norm. I don’t have a problem with that per se, but isn’t that going to result in more cars on the road? Those who take the bus often living farther away from school, and so it might not be practical to cycle or walk. Certainly from where we live to school it would take me twenty minutes to walk, and as Eben comes with us and as he won’t walk, I’d have to carry him. That’s there and back. And he would be too small to cycle, and even Elijah is too small to cycle to school. I just don’t think people are thinking these things through properly. We’ll just end up with even more cars on the roads.

I also find it hilarious (in a sad way) that months ago we were making progress in getting rid of single use plastic, and now we can’t get enough of it. I was told that at one of the private schools, children have been told they must bring their lunch box into school in a plastic bag. And then there’s all that single use plastic gloves, and with everything being cleaned within an inch of its life, we’ll be going through a number of those as a society.

Of course i care desperately about Mother Earth and how she is tended, but I also care deeply about the children, the next generation. I can’t help thinking that in the quest to protect the vulnerable, children are the ones to suffer. Their desks are spread apart, no group work, or small team work, none of the play activity that was in place, at pre-school, plastic toys are back in, out goes the sand and the water, and presumably free play goes too as everything has to be controlled and managed and risk assessed. Argh.

Don’t get me wrong, of course I don’t want people to die, but I also don’t want children growing up anxious, depressed and having to grow up before their time. They are children and children play. Children have snotty noses. Children touch as they try to make sense of the world, they explore, they hug, they leap and they jump. Children need to be allowed to be children, not controlled within an inch of their lives for a virus that they may or may not get. There is always a bigger picture and every action will have a consequence, and I hope those making the decisions are really comfortable with the choices they are making and what this means for our children’s wellbeing long term, let alone this planet we live on.

I was blown away, just couldn’t get my head around events on Saturday. Not least the appalling and public murder of George Floyd and the rioting that ensued, not so much that I was surprised about this, because the voice needed to be heard, black lives do matter, and it is time, it has been time for an awfully long time now, and I am embarrassed to be part of a humanity which continues to discriminate and separate and silence, and to live amongst those who have such a blatant disregard for the lives of others. Then we have a space shuttle going up in the air!

E and I actually stood outside and watched the space station pass over Guernsey and then about six minutes later the shuttle passed too, it was really faint and I couldn’t see it properly, but E managed to follow it’s path, this with the moon out too. This the dream of Elon Musk, a tech billionaire, who wants to see life established on Mars so that the human species can continue, because he expects us to become extinct here on Mother Earth. He might be right, but I can’t help thing, wouldn’t the money not be better spent on improving the way we live on Mother Earth, so that we might continue as a specie and so that we don’t destroy Gaia in the process?

It just seems so arrogant to me. We’ll exploit this planet through greed, with the focus on money and accumulation of wealth at the expense of everything else, we’ll develop tech, which is meant to solve all our problems, yet from my experience during lock down this just added to my stress levels, and the stress levels of others, yes I might have been able to teach yoga through Zoom, but many of my regular students couldn’t join me because their internet kept dropping out or they had spent so long on the computer already that day with work and online learning that they’d had quite enough!

He’s involved in all sorts of others stuff too, including gentle artificial intelligence whatever that is, and he does some good stuff, helping make fresh water available to communities in the US, supporting companies developing renewable energy. But you know, do we really need to go to Mars? Aren’t we doing a bad enough job looking after this planet? if we all just lived a little more simply. I don’t know about this whole space thing. Why do we have to keep messing with things? We’ll never know, it doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at it, how many scientists are involved, it’s the great is mystery. That is the sacred.

I’ve been watching this series of lectures on the Goddess recently and it has been mind blowing actually, to see how much she was revered all those years ago and the artefacts that have been found and the cave paintings and all this amazing imagery of the big breasts, the big tummy, the big thighs and the public triangle. Often she had no face and no feet, they weren’t viewed as important, not in the grand scheme of things. For she was the provider of life, without her, the woman, the goddess, there will be no life.

Then patriarchy arrived and all of a sudden her image changes, she is sexualised. To see it in artefacts and imagery, really did impact on me. How the manner in which she was visually presented changed. Her breasts became smaller and pert and often now clothed, her pubic triangle, big thighs and big tummy also disappeared, she was masculine physically, with tight stomach muscles in one image, like a six pack, and she was made to be physically attractive to the other sex and demoted too, as less than a man, no longer revered for her ability to give life, but now as the sexual conquest, owned.

Now she rises again, and yet she still has to find her way, because even women reject what she means. Still there is the pressure for the masculine in the physicality, women who have big breast, big tummies and big thighs are always trying to lose them, to change themselves, to become less of what they are, to reject the goddess and her power of life. In Ayurveda this is the classical Kapha, the mother, the nurturer. It saddens me that women naturally designed this way, should give themselves such a blinking hard time for it. You can’t beat a big breasted hug, my mum’s best friend has the biggest boobs I know and I love her the more for it, because it’s comforting somehow, to be hugged by someone that has such power within them, the goddess embodied.

Not to say that those of us scant breasted women should give themselves a hard time either. I’ve still managed to breastfeed both my boys and I’m still breastfeeding Eben at three and three quarters, and I don’t know where the milk comes from, but it comes! I suppose I just mean that we need to embrace all we have , and our children and the lives that we are creating for them, that we allow to be created for them.

I went to visit the Gran’Mere, the goddess at St Martin’s church today. She still wears the necklaces I hung on her at Beltain, I am surprised that no one has removed them, but perhaps people wouldn’t feel touching her. She too has been changed, an attempt has been made to masculine her, give her a male face. She has been damaged and yet someone was kind enough to try to mend her. I thought as I stood there touching her, that at least her breasts have stood the test of time, that they didn’t take those from her, that something stopped them doing that, that even that was a step too far perhaps, and they sliced her in two instead and tried to hide her somewhere in the church when patriarchy arrived and took over, fearful of the mother and her power.

Yet her power has never gone, not really. It cannot be taken from her. Men cannot carry or birth children. It is women that are afforded the opportunity for the transformation that this brings, for the surrendering that comes from the journey to motherhood and of motherhood itself, because there is a power and there is a connection and there is, without doubt, the sacred. I don’t mean that men don’t necessarily feel it, only that women get to touch it, to grow something within them that is part of the great mystery too.

Recently I have heard of a number of ladies who have miscarried or who are preparing for yet more IVF when they are able to access the clinics again and I am reminded how cruel this world can be, on this journey of fertility and conception, and yet how much light we can find if we surrender even to those most cruelest of moments of shattered dreams and yet more heart ache. This prepares us somehow, some of us, who have had to take that journey, for what lies ahead the faced with the choices we need to make with the children we may have brought into this world, who have chosen us because of the choices we might make for them, because we desperately wanted them and were conscious about inviting them in (others were conscious too, you don’t have to have had IVF or to have miscarried to be conscious about pregnancy and motherhood).

The choices are sometimes challenging, because often you have to go against the flow, your truth tells you so. Your anger and frustration reminds you so. It takes courage to follow a different path that has not been walked before, to trust that the unknown will hold you in its gentle bosom, and reveal a little more of its mystery to you, as you surrender to your own truth, come what may, and recognise that you do not have to be beholden to what others have decided is the way, who may not feel the same about life as you do, not really, to deep inside, not yet. It can be hard. But I find that worshipping the goddess gives strength, and the moon, well she, the beautiful moon, is supporting the process. It’s a fiery one; give voice to your truth, and allow a new path to reveal itself to you.

I hope you get to enjoy her energy and can sit with your emotions as they come up. This is the first of the eclipses in the eclipse season and I am told that this relates to what was happening in your life between 2010 and 2013. Funnily enough this was when we were finally settling with the idea of having children, and went one our journey through IVF to finally birth Elijah into this world. So I suppose it is interesting how much this is on my mind and I am reminded by others sharing their pains on their own journey to motherhood with me recently. The moon never lies, she always brings in that to which we need to give our attention. So I’ll go sit with that and see you on the other side!

Love Emma x