Third Time Around
Total Eclipse of the Soul
The first thing I want to say is that I can actually feel the weight of this one in my bones.
My third nodal return. Fifty-five years old. Damn near fifty-six. Which is surreal in and of itself, because somewhere in the back of my mind I’m still a dreadlocked 30-something, sneaking bowl hits outside an edit bay in Santa Monica, talking shit, flirting with coworkers, and trying to become somebody. Or maybe more accurately, trying to become some mythic future version of myself that I assumed would eventually arrive fully assembled, like a special-order spiritual action figure with all accessories included.
He never showed up, by the way.
Instead, life kept happening. Eighteen years. Eighteen more. And then another eighteen. The dragon keeps circling back. The compass keeps getting checked. And whether you’re ready or not, whether you’ve been paying attention or sleepwalking through your own biography, the question returns: Are you actually on the path? Are you moving toward the thing your soul came here to become? Or have you drifted so far into habit, identity, and performance that you can no longer hear the deeper signal underneath the noise?
That’s what this feels like to me. A call from some hidden place in my soul.
Maybe that’s also why this feels so charged right now. This week’s lunar eclipse landed right on my nodal axis, which is a pretty efficient way for the cosmos to say, “Yes, we’re talking about this now.” As if the long arc of the nodal return suddenly condensed into a single, unmistakable moment of pressure.
The first time this happened, I was eighteen. Well, duh. That’s when it happens for everyone the first time. But for me, it was December 1988. And of course I had no idea what a nodal return was. I barely knew what the hell I was. I was just a know-it-all Gen X teenager standing at the edge of adulthood, full of hunger and curiosity and wanderlust, convinced my destiny was “out there” somewhere, waiting for me beyond the horizon. I didn’t know how to read the instrument panel yet. But I knew enough to feel the ache of becoming. I knew enough to sense there was some larger story unfolding, even if I was nowhere near wise enough to name it.
By my second nodal return, in 2007, that was a different story. By then I was already deep into astrology. Deep enough to feel the poignancy of it. Deep enough to know that some cycles call us beyond just the marking time, but invite us to contemplate an emerging pattern. They expose the mythic architecture underneath our mundane life. And looking back now, what strikes me is how clearly I was already living the split-screen of my own nodal axis. My outer life was thriving. I was navigating Hollywood successfully, making good money, building momentum, and at the same time launching a retail clothing business with my then wife that grew into multiple boutiques in Los Angeles and even one in Bali. On paper, it was a high-water mark of tenth-house Virgo competence. Productive. Visible. Enterprising. Materially engaged.
And yet at the exact same time, I was also immersed in my Kundalini yoga teacher training. I was moving through a much more interior process, a much quieter initiation, one that felt less like ambition and more like remembrance. Less like building a career and more like hearing a call. What James Hillman calls the Soul’s Code. So even then, the axis was already speaking. The worldly and the spiritual. The measurable and the mystical. The polished outer success and the inward turn toward soul. I didn’t fully understand it yet, but I was already living the paradox. I was already trying to hold two different orders of reality in the same pair of hands.
And now here it is again, this third pass of the dragon over the same sensitive point in my chart, during an eclipse no less. So this time it feels heavier and more immediate. Like the long inner conversation has finally moved out of the background and into the center of the room. The mirror is right in front of me now, and it is no longer asking what I think my North Node means. It’s asking whether I’m actually ready to live it.
My North Node is in Pisces in the fourth house. My South Node is in Virgo in the tenth. I’ve known that for years, obviously, but some placements take half a lifetime before they really tell you what they mean. Or maybe before you’re humble enough to hear them. Because this axis says so much about the tension I’ve been living inside for decades. The worldly, technical, productive, competent part of me. The part that works, edits, organizes, delivers, gets the thing done, makes the deadline, earns the money, builds the reputation. That whole Virgo-in-the-tenth-house apparatus. I know that part of myself intimately. I’ve been living there a long time.
Lifetimes, actually.
And maybe that’s exactly how long I needed. That’s the thing. I’ve never bought the simplistic South Node story, the one that says the task is to simply leave the past behind, as if spiritual growth were some kind of cosmic Marie Kondo project. Thank you, Virgo, for your service—now please exit quietly to the left. No. That has never felt true to me. It feels more intimate than that. More paradoxical. More like I’ve spent thirty years honing a set of tools I was always going to need, but not for the reasons I thought. As if the craft itself was a kind of initiation. As if editing was never just my job, but my training in discernment. My apprenticeship in timing. My education in rhythm, precision, narrative, and the invisible architecture underneath appearances.
Because now I’m leaving behind a thirty-year career in entertainment, in editing, in the most Virgo profession imaginable, and trying to establish a new foundation as a full-time astrologer, consultant, writer, and weird little woo-technician of the future. And let me tell you, that sentence still lands in my own ears with a mix of sincerity and absurdity. There’s a part of me that laughs when I say it out loud. A part that cringes. A part that wants to issue a disclaimer. And then there is another part—the quietest but truest part—that simply says: yes. Yes, this. This is the move.
And that’s what makes this so intense. It’s moving out of the theoretical, beyond some elegant symbolic exercise I can map onto a client’s chart and admire from a safe professional distance. I’m in it. My life is actually changing. My old tenth-house identity is actually crumbling, while the fourth-house ground under my feet is actually shifting. The familiar structures are dissolving. The old coordinates don’t quite work anymore. It’s no longer about contemplating what my North Node means. It’s about whether I have the courage to let it reorganize my life from the inside out.
And I have to say: that process is not cute.
People love to romanticize reinvention, especially in this culture. The brave pivot. The soulful leap. The inspiring second act. The hero finally answering the call. Which all sounds great on paper, or in a Substack bio, or at a dinner party with other spiritually literate middle-aged creatives trying to convince each other we’re not terrified. But actually living it at fifty-five? Actually loosening your grip on the identity that paid your bills, structured your days, earned your status, and gave other people a simple answer when they asked what you do? That’s another thing entirely. How many people are making this kind of move at this age? Some, surely. But it doesn’t exactly feel like the culturally sanctioned path. It feels more like squeezing through a crack in reality while your former life keeps shouting after you, “Are you absolutely sure about this?”
No. I am not absolutely sure.
Maybe that’s the point.
Or maybe it’s not the point. But it certainly feels like part of the texture.
Because we are not living in calm, coherent times. We are trying to reorient ourselves in the middle of a civilizational crisis. The world feels like it is on fire. Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on. The Middle East is once again ablaze, now in an even wider and more volatile conflict. In the United States, Donald Trump’s unthinkable comeback has returned him to the Oval Office, emboldened to wield presidential power in ways that any sensible person would describe as increasingly concerning. Meanwhile, the divisions in the country only seem to grow wider and deeper.
We can’t ignore this broader dis-order. Because this is the atmosphere we are breathing. This is the historical weather. None of us are navigating our charts in a vacuum. We’re doing it inside a meaning crisis, inside institutional erosion, inside technological upheaval, inside a culture where old maps no longer hold and new ones are being generated by the hour, often by people trying to sell us certainty in bulk. That’s part of what the earlier posts in this thread were circling too: the sense that we are living through the collapse of familiar structures and trying to create from within that collapse without pretending we stand outside it.
“What does it mean to choose a soul path in a time like this?”
So yes, my third nodal return is personal. Intimate. Deeply my own. But it is also happening inside a much larger unraveling. Which means the question isn’t just, “What am I doing with my life?” It’s also, “What does it mean to choose a soul path in a time like this?” What does it mean to choose depth when the culture rewards speed? What does it mean to choose inner authority when outer authority is fragmenting everywhere you look? What does it mean to follow a symbolic navigation system when the collective itself seems to be driving off a cliff?
That’s the real pressure I’m feeling.
There’s something almost unbearably ironic to me about having Rahu in Pisces and Ketu in Virgo. My material destiny in the most mystical sign. My spiritual inheritance in the most practical. It’s such a beautiful cosmic joke. My dragon does not want me to choose between spirit and matter. It wants me to braid them. It wants me to stop acting like mysticism and technique belong to different worlds. To stop pretending I have to choose between the sacred and the skillful, between imagination and rigor, between the dream and the final cut. It wants the harder thing. The less glamorous thing. The integrated thing.
And maybe that is the work now. Not fleeing the Virgo life I built, but redeeming it. Redeeming the years in the edit bay. Redeeming the craft. Redeeming the worldly competence. Redeeming the part of me that learned how to organize complexity, shape story, hold tension, work with timing, and make meaning through finer and finer cuts. Maybe none of that was ever separate from the soul. Maybe I only imagined the split because the culture taught me to split it. Career over here. Spirit over there. Paycheck here. Calling there. Technique here. Mystery there.
But life doesn’t seem interested in honoring that division anymore.
Not in me, anyway.
And all of this is happening while Saturn and Neptune are finishing up their long transit through my fourth house. Of course they are. Years of home improvements. Then selling my home. Then landing back in my childhood home. Back to my roots. Back to the basement—both physically and psychologically. Back to the original seed and hometown soil. It’s so textbook it would be embarrassing if it weren’t also so goddamn uncanny. But at this point, I’m beyond embarrassed by the literalness of astrology. This is just how my life works now. The symbols don’t merely describe the process after the fact. They participate in it. They constellate it. They give me a language for the strange intimacy between my psyche and the world.
And that matters, because without that language, I think this transition would feel far more chaotic, and far less meaningful. That, to me, is the gift of astrology in a time like this. A way of reading the quality of time. A way of sensing what kind of threshold I am actually standing in. A way of remembering that my life is not random, even when it feels increasingly unstable.
Maybe that’s also why I write these Notes from the Liminal Edge in the first place.
I’m certainly not writing these because I think my personal transits are so fascinating that they need to be broadcast publicly. By Jove, no. But because I suspect that if I can narrate my own passage honestly enough—without pretending certainty, without bypassing the fear, without sanding down the contradictions—then maybe the writing becomes a kind of lantern. No formula. No five-step method. Just a small light. A record of one person trying to use his own navigation system in real time while the collective weather gets stranger by the day. And maybe, just maybe, by demonstrating my own path through the fog, I can help other people trust the symbols showing up in their own lives.
That feels close to the heart of my work.
To model a way of relating to the mystery without collapsing into superstition on one side or sterile skepticism on the other. To stay in the oscillation. To hold the irony and the sincerity together. To admit that yes, I am talking about dragons and destiny and transits and karmic compasses in the year 2026 while geopolitics convulse and algorithms eat the world. And also: I’m completely serious. Because when the old frameworks crack, people go looking for clearer signals. They go looking for more reliable patterns. They go looking for some way to orient themselves that is deeper than branding, productivity, or partisan hysteria.
So here I am, third time around, standing in the crucible of my own life, trying to squeeze through. I wanna seem graceful. I wanna seem heroic. But I look more like some middle-aged mythic racoon dragging thirty years of Virgo tools through a Piscean birth canal. It’s undignified. It’s holy. It’s absurd. It’s real.
And maybe that’s why this moment feels so different from the last return. There’s less ambition in it. Less striving. Less fantasy about arriving somewhere fixed and impressive. More surrender, but not in the passive sense. More like consent. Consent to the life that is trying to happen through me. Consent to the possibility that my soul may actually know what it’s doing, even when my ego is pacing around the room in a full conniption fit demanding a budget, a strategy deck, and some kind of guarantee from the cosmos.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s all a nodal return really is. A moment when the deeper current makes itself known again. A moment when the life you’ve constructed and the life that is calling you stand face to face, and you can no longer pretend they are the same thing. Or maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe it’s just one of those rare moments when you can feel the truth before you can explain it.
And I can feel it right now.
It feels old. It feels new. It feels terrifying. It feels costly. It feels strangely, almost offensively, simple.
Like I am being asked, again, to trust the acorn.
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