Today is an eclipse.
The next two weeks mark what astrologers and skywatchers call an eclipse season, a window of time between a lunar and solar eclipse. It often turns out to be a quietly transformational stretch in many people’s lives, sometimes noticed only in retrospect.
Today is also the 14th day of the month of Elul, a beautiful and powerful month in the Hebrew calendar of preparation for the High Holy Days which begin just after this eclipse season closes.
All of this has me thinking about transformational time.
Everyone has a different relationship with time.
Some people see it in blocks and lists. Some feel it rushing past. Others experience it more like fog, or tide, or pressure.
I’ve been learning more lately about how time works for me—how my particular neurodivergence shapes my perception of it, how my sense of “now” and “not now” affects everything from housework to how I prepare for travel, how I move through the world.
The way each of us experiences time tells us something about what time really is. Not a machine. Not a neutral container. But something alive. Relational. Shaped by context, nervous system, memory, ecosystem, lineage.
We’re shaped by time, yes, and we shape it in return.
There are many ways to connect with time as a transformational force. Some are given to us by the cosmos. Some are passed down through culture. Some we choose, intentionally, with others, as a path of learning or reorientation.
Today I want to speak about three such forms of time:
* Celestial time—the eclipse season we’re entering now.
* Cultural-sacred time—the High Holy Days of the Hebrew calendar, and the current month of Elul.
* Chosen time—the kind we create on purpose, like a spiritual practice, or a shared container for transformation.
These three forms of time are converging right now for me, and perhaps for many of you as well. And if we meet them with presence, they can reshape us. Help us reshape what comes next.
We begin with celestial time.
Eclipses have always held a particular kind of charge for me. Not in the astrological sense, though there are insights there, but more in the felt somatic experience of what they bring. They arrive like pressure systems—subtle at first, then unmistakable. Often disorienting. Sometimes exhausting. Always intense.
I got engaged on an eclipse. I’ve also often found myself literally breaking things, nearly always drawing blood on eclipse days. When I’ve ignored what my body needed and pushed through high-stakes experiences like creative directing a photo shoot, leading a ceremony, or giving a major talk, I’ve often paid for it afterward with days of rest and recovery. My system demands recalibration after trying to do too much in a time that asks for quiet presence.
This particular eclipse season begins today, September 7th, and ends with the solar eclipse in Virgo on September 21. I invite you to mark it by not only the astronomical alignments, but your personal and collective thresholds. Eclipses often reveal what was hidden, amplify what has been ignored, and accelerate change that’s already underway. Doors open. Doors close. Life’s curveballs remind us that there are larger forces that don’t follow our logic or our schedules. They ask us to pay attention.
In my own body, I’ve learned to stop trying to push through eclipse portals. I rest more. I simplify. I listen to what’s surfacing not just in my own field, but in the collective. For many of us, this may be a time of deep review, of shedding, of stepping into a more aligned way of being. There’s a bigger invitation asking for us to show up to life in a more authentic, present way.
Pictured above, an eclipse day nine years ago which called for stitches. Today, right now I have an ace bandage on the same exact wrist. I allow the injury to be a teacher, and am grateful I seem to only ever injure my right, non dominant hand on days like today. Pictured below, the painting of an eclipse I did after I came home from the clinic with my stitches, having realized it was an eclipse day (I wasn’t aware before). Writing this, and going back into these archives I’m realizing this was the last time we went through a cycle of Virgo-Pisces axis eclipses.
Celestial time reminds us that transformation doesn’t always come from striving. Sometimes it comes from tuning in to what is already happening.
We exist within the larger cycles and patterns of our solar system. That’s not woo, it’s a geospatial, gravitational, and biological reality. The earth spins, the sun sets and our bodies respond. The moon shifts and our tides follow.
You don’t have to believe in astrology to notice that you are part of something vast and rhythmic. But I do encourage people to learn the archetypes—the cosmological stories of the planets and lights that our ancestors mapped and named. Just notice what resonates. Notice how those patterns might reflect dimensions of your own experience.
Celestial time isn’t something out there. It’s something we’re already inside of. The invitation is just to listen a little more closely.
Next, we turn to cultural-sacred time.
In Judaism, the primary spiritual technology is the calendar. Not as an abstract framework, but as a relationship with time that is spiralic and rooted in the land, in memory, and in transformation. This time of year—Elul through the High Holy Days—is especially powerful.
The month of Elul is a time of preparation and reflection, a month where our dreams speak to us and we prepare for the most intense period of soul work in the year. Elul softens us, attunes us, calls us inward. And it leads into Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the Ten Days of Awe that follow. A liminal time when the gates are open, when we are invited to remember who we are and consider with great awareness, who we are becoming.
The tradition teaches that during this window, our names are written in the Book of Life or the Book of Death in the year to come. In these ten days, it is understood that our actions, our prayers, our atonement, our generosity, our return to center, all of these can change our fate. These can shape the year to come.
This living ritual where millions of people around the world are living out ancient rituals in ways that are always, somehow both timeless and unique to the moment, the place, and the family or community in which they are unfolding, is a truly amazing thing to participate in. Yes, I cry sometimes when I sing this silly song with my husband and son and remember how connected and held we are in such a beautiful tradition.
Holy days are a sacred structure for transformation. If you are connected with a cultural invitation to slow down, get present within a larger community or context, take full account of our lives, and begin again, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Finally, we come to chosen time.
There are kinds of time that we intentionally create or step into. Retreats, journeys, deep practice containers. Sometimes these are guided by a teacher or held by a community. Sometimes they’re self-initiated. But they are always marked by intention.
We cross a threshold and say: I will move differently through these days. I will listen more closely. I will open to transformation.
Reality Reorientation Experiment: Living in Timeis just such a container. Four weeks of simple, powerful invitations to slow down, to attune to the place you live, to reconnect with deep time and the living world. Rather than another thing to consume, it’s an invitation to remember our wholeness within the web of life, and repattern how we live.
And it begins soon.
I’ve been working on it for more than a month actually, but I wasn’t sure when I would offer it, just that it would be free, and the time would be right. A few days ago when I realized the timing of the eclipse that will close this season (September 21), and the day that Rosh Hashanah begins (September 22), it clicked that this will be something that will carry many of us into the new life we are able to choose and cultivate through these transformational times.
So Reality Reorientation begins on September 20th. Whether you’re observing the Chagim, feeling big changes in your life with the unfolding of the eclipses, or are feeling the call for transforming your relationship with time, place, ecology, self, or world, this is here to support you.
Each week we will connect gently with one of the great teachers of the Living World: Stones, Trees, Waters, and Stars. Each week there will be a brief lesson, an embodied meditation, and some prompts to help integrate the insights that organically arise from within you when you make time to connect with yourself and with life, into your life.
You can find more information here.There is no cost to join, and we encourage people to participate alongside loved ones: friends, lovers, family. Growing alongside one another nurtures intimacy, shared reality, affinity, and overall integrity. So feel welcome to invite your friends in to this process!
This morning, my son picked up the book that’s been sitting on my nightstand—Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman—and called it the "clock book." It’s a collection of imagined worlds where time moves differently in each one, framed as the dreams Einstein might have had while working on the theory of relativity.
I’ve always loved reading this book aloud, and I’m thinking of doing just that—hosting a little live storytime. Reading a passage and exploring what it might teach us about time, imagination, and the living world.
Would that interest you?
Let me know. I’d love to explore this with you.
And before we close: a reminder. Opportunities for transformational time are not limited to eclipse seasons or holy days or special containers offered by people on the internet. They are always here. Always available.
Every month in the Hebrew calendar holds deep teachings. Every moment astrologically is alive with motion and meaning. And every ordinary day offers us moments to listen, to share, to realign with what matters.
Whether or not you join us for this next round of the Experiment, know this: time is not something that happens to you. You are already inside it. You are already in relationship with it. And it’s listening and being shaped by you.
What kind of relationship with time do you want to have?
