Where the writing goes when you’re tired
There’s a total solar eclipse in Leo on Wednesday. Three questions, and nothing you have to decide.
I’m tired. My body keeps its own calendar and it’s about to make its monthly announcement. Add to that the energy from the Lion’s Gate portal (which is still open til tomorrow) and the eclipse energy… it’s a lot. I’ve been moving slow for days.
When I sat down to write about tomorrow’s eclipse, everything came out dramatic. Big claims with an entire agenda attached to it. So I threw it out, cuz I suspect a few of you are running on the same nonexistent fumes I’m on. Goddess Caffeina has been like, “girl bye. Dis ain’t it.”
Like I say in the Friday Altar, here’s the tea:
Tomorrow, there’s a total solar eclipse at 20 degrees of Leo. It’s a new moon, so the sun and moon are in the same spot in the sky, and the moon passes across the face of the sun.
Totality only touches a narrow strip of the world: a stretch of the Arctic, the eastern edge of Greenland, western Iceland, the top of Spain and a corner of Portugal. It’s the first time totality has crossed mainland Europe since August 11, 1999.
Most of the northern United States gets a partial. From The Story Temple HQ, it’ll be a bite out of the side of the sun in the early afternoon, and small enough that if I didn’t already know it was happening I wouldn’t look up. Knowing me, I probably won’t.
Two things make this one worth your attention. (1) We haven’t had an eclipse in Leo since January of 2019 (mind you, that was a north node eclipse). (2) And when it goes exact, the sun, the moon, Mercury and Jupiter are all hanging out together, having a celestial meet up.
A new moon is a beginning, and an eclipse isn’t a usual new moon. The energy is different, and the guidance across a lot of traditions is often the same: don’t initiate under one. Watch instead.
This one also sits at the south end of the nodal axis. The south node is what you came here already knowing how to do, the competence you never had to build and cultivate, and the place you go without deciding to. Leo is about identity and being seen. Put those together and the question to sit with this week is what you’ve been known for long enough.
Three questions, and that’s it
10 minutes, on paper. Writing by hand activates different cells in the brain.
What am I known for on the page?
Where does my writing go when I’m tired? And be honest. Tired writing heads straight for whatever’s easiest and best-built in us, and it’ll tell you the truth expeditiously.
What would I write if no one had ever told me I was good at anything?
Answer these stream-of-consciousness style. Write until you’re done, then stop.
Don’t decide anything yet
Sixteen days later, shortly past midnight (in my timezone) on August 28, there’s a partial lunar eclipse happening in Pisces. 96% of the moon goes into the earth’s shadow. Sidebar: I tend to feel lunar eclipses more than I do solar eclipses, but we’ll see. Sometimes the energy from a solar eclipse will put me on my ass.
Whatever you feel certain about on Wednesday will probably feel nebulous before the month is out. That’s the nature of Pisces. Clarity gets fuzzy and feelings go everywhere and nowhere at once.
Read your answers again in September. Nothing has to be settled by then.
What to read this week
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” from Sister Outsider. It’s free online.
Her argument is that the writing comes up out of feeling and the dark, from what she calls the hidden and growing places in us (I call this the void). If like me, you’ve got nothing (and mean NOTHING) in the tank this week, she’ll tell you that’s exactly where the work has been living the whole time. I hope it blesses you the way it blessed me.
May you look at the thing on Wednesday without having to do a single thing about it. May you read the tiredness as information. And may the writer you’re becoming take her time getting there. Àṣẹ 𓂀✧⟡
Paid members get this kind of work every month inside the Temple: the framework teaching, the spiritual grounding, and The Gathering thread, where the questions above are exactly the kind of thing we take into community. $7/month or $77/year.
One more thing…
Starting next week: Four essays on why your draft stops in the same place.
Every writer works through one element by default. It’s the reason you’re good at what you’re good at. It’s also the reason the draft stops where it always stops. One mechanism, running in two directions.
One element each over the next four Tuesdays. What it gives you. Where it snags. What the snag is buying you. And the one move that gets the pages going again, which you can do the same day you read it. ✌🏾
About the author
High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.
Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.
Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.
Well, damn, I was wondering why I'm so tired so early in the day, since it's been an easy morning, both emotionally and physically. It saps a lot of energy o hang on to an illusion of separateness, in the face of evidence like this of connection to the universe.