A strange sound emanated from beneath my pillow just ahead of the witching hour on Friday morning. My mind pretended not to hear it, but the muffled insistence of an unfamiliar ringtone persisted until I forced my eyes open, vaguely aware of having set an alarm the night before so that I could witness the rare event of a blood moon— a phenomenon that seems as shrouded in mystery as I was in my comforter in that moment. I purposely chose a ringtone that was different from my usual, so that I would not be tempted to tap the snooze button.

What exactly is “the witching hour?”

During COVID, I had frequent bouts of restlessness that woke me at 3 am, and a Google search about this pattern yielded a myriad of results, from possible liver overload (hey, we were all drinking more in those days) to fluctuating hormones (reasonable, given that Mother Nature tossed me into the menopause bin at the worst time in history), to the most startling and somewhat upsetting reason of all: the “witching hour.” Apparently, there’s a spiritual veil between the realms of life and death, and it is thinnest at 3 am. It felt redeeming that this time, I needed an alarm to rouse me into standing in my jammies in the backyard, staring at the sky.

Drama above, uncertainty below

Scientifically, a blood moon is easy to explain: it’s the alignment of a full moon and the sun, with Earth in the middle. It presents in the night sky with a reddish hue over the familiar craters on the lunar surface. From a mystical standpoint, however, it seems a bit more complex. It was a spectacular sight— more so than my amateur phone camera skills could ever capture.

By the magic of the algorithm, which latches onto one’s slightest hint of curiosity and subsequently serves up a smorgasbord of related information, my Instagram feed was flooded on Thursday night with posts and reels that emphasized, sometimes urgently, that this lunar eclipse was going to be a powerful one. Something to do with the eclipse being in Virgo, and that makes sense to me because I married a man born under that sign, and urgency is his middle name (well, except in the name of this eclipse because when I nudged him if he wanted to join me outside, he made a mostly unintelligible sound that I interpreted as “no”). What is less clear to me is what the eclipse means in terms of the spiritual growth that all the mystics said was straight ahead.

This particular celestial event is said to be a time for “letting go,” but of what? For some reason, a bible verse I once studied has been playing on repeat in my mind. I’m out of practice on such things, but the gist of it was about silver being refined in the fire. It is only under intense heat and pressure that impurities rise to the surface to be skimmed away. I feel this deep in my chest, as if something has been begging to be skimmed out of my current reality. 

On reflection, realignment and letting go

Perhaps some of you can relate to having too much on your mind as of late. I can easily conjure a list of things that I need to “let go,” as suggested by the Instagram mystics. In no particular order:

• Worrying— about the future of Earth and all its inhabitants, but especially those who have been historically marginalized for no good reason. Using my voice for good is the right thing, but worrying does not help. 

• Regrets and long-gone ambitions— they only hold me back from being the best version of me that I can be today. That was then, this is now and I am reminded that I am overdue to clean out my closet (figuratively, but also literally).

• Trying to figure it all out. Every. Single. Freaking. Thing. I’m exhausted from trying to mentally solve the problems of our country and the world, and most of the time I feel guilty for not having more problems than some other people around me. I am privileged because of my race, which isn’t my fault. It also isn’t fair. 

At the break of day

I woke for the second time on Friday at 7:15 am, and I felt extra weary from the sleep I lost staring at the moon. Clarity doesn’t always come quickly, and I suppose that is the point.