The eclipse, the cycles returning around us, and what they might be asking us to see differently this time.
The Beauty of Cycles is a recurring Beauty of Communications series exploring the rhythms and patterns that shape communication, culture, relationships, leadership, nature, and everyday life.
What If We’ve Been Here Before?
I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles lately.
Not just moon cycles. Life cycles. Relationship cycles. Communication cycles. Business cycles. News cycles. Political cycles. The patterns we swear we’re finished with until somehow we find ourselves standing in a familiar place again.
And I’ve started wondering:
What if returning to something doesn’t always mean we’re going backward?
What if sometimes we’re being given another opportunity to see the same thing from a different level of understanding?
That’s what brought me here.
Today is August 12, 2026, and there’s a total solar eclipse happening in Leo.
Scientifically, we know what’s happening. The Moon is passing between Earth and the Sun. Because the Moon’s orbit is tilted, this doesn’t happen every month; eclipses occur when the geometry lines up near the lunar nodes. Today’s path of totality crosses Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, Spain and a small part of Portugal. (NASA Science)
That’s the astronomy.
But humans have never been particularly good at looking at something spectacular in the sky and saying, Well, that’s some interesting geometry, and going about our business.
We’ve always looked for meaning. And that’s where this gets interesting.
So, What Cycle Are We Actually In?
Astrologically, today’s solar eclipse occurs at approximately 20 degrees of Leo. It’s part of a larger series of eclipses moving across the Leo/Aquarius axis from February 2026 through January 2028. (Cafe Astrology)
If you’re not deep into astrology, stay with me.
You don’t have to believe that planets control human behavior for this conversation to be worthwhile.
I’m interested in astrology here as a language of patterns.
Leo and Aquarius represent a fascinating opposition.
Leo asks:
Who am I?
Aquarius asks:
Who are we?
Leo is associated with individual expression, creativity, visibility, leadership, courage and recognition.
Aquarius is associated with community, networks, innovation, technology, unconventional ideas and collective thinking.
And when I started looking at those themes, I immediately thought:
Well, if that doesn’t sound like the world we’re living in right now.
We’ve Spent Years Learning How to Be Seen
Think about how much communication has changed.
We have personal brands.
Followers.
Influencers.
Creators.
Podcasters.
Citizen journalists.
Independent publishers.
People building entire businesses from their phones. For generations, if you wanted access to a large audience, somebody had to let you in.
A newspaper.
A television station.
A record label.
A publishing company.
A corporation.
Some gatekeeper somewhere usually had to decide that your voice was worth distributing. That has changed dramatically. Today, one person with a phone can reach millions. That’s incredibly powerful. But there is another side to it.
We’ve also created a culture where being seen can become more important than actually having something to say.
Visibility can masquerade as credibility.
Followers can masquerade as community.
Performance can masquerade as authenticity.
And leadership can slowly turn into personality worship. Which makes this Leo/Aquarius symbolism especially interesting to me.
Maybe the question isn’t whether the individual should disappear.
Maybe the question is:
What are we doing with all this individual power now that we have it?
From “Look at Me” to “Look at What We Can Build”
This is where Aquarius enters the conversation. Because an audience and a community aren’t the same thing.
An audience watches you.
A community participates.
An audience might admire your vision.
A community helps build it.
And we’re already watching communication move in that direction.
Independent media networks are growing.
Open source communities build technology together.
People crowdsource information and funding.
Citizen journalists document events before traditional media organizations arrive.
Businesses are built around online communities that didn’t exist a generation ago. Artificial intelligence is changing how knowledge is created, organized and distributed.
People who might never have met geographically are collaborating every day. Maybe the next communications revolution isn’t simply about learning how to get more attention. Maybe it’s about learning how to connect people better.
That’s a very different kind of power.
And Apparently, We’ve Been Around This Neighborhood Before
Here’s where studying astrological cycles gets fun. The lunar nodes cycle through the zodiac roughly every 18.6 years. Astrologers therefore look backward at previous periods involving the same Leo/Aquarius axis and ask whether similar themes were present.
Previous Leo/Aquarius eclipse periods included roughly 2008–2009, 1998–2000, and 2016–2019. Today’s eclipse itself falls near the same zodiac degree as solar eclipses in 2018, 1999, 1980 and 1961. (Cafe Astrology)
And those comparisons immediately make me curious.
Think about 2007 through 2009.
The iPhone arrived. Social media was accelerating. Our relationship with information was changing. At the same time, the housing bubble collapsed and the global financial system went into crisis.
Go farther back and you find other periods of enormous technological, cultural and political change. Does that mean astrology caused any of it? No.
We don’t have scientific evidence establishing that. But does it make me curious about recurring patterns? Absolutely.
And curiosity is enough reason to investigate something.
But We Have to Be Careful With Patterns
There’s something else I want to acknowledge. Human beings are excellent pattern finders. Sometimes a little too excellent.
If I decide an astrological cycle represents technological revolution, I can search history until I find technological events that support my theory.
That’s confirmation bias.
The responsible question is also:
What happened during those periods that doesn’t fit the story?
I don’t think asking that ruins the spiritual side of the conversation.
I think it makes it better.
I want The Beauty of Cycles to be somewhere we can be curious without pretending to know everything.
We can talk about astronomy.
We can explore astrology.
We can look at history.
We can consider spirituality.
We can question all four.
I don’t need every mystery solved before I’m allowed to find it fascinating.
Sometimes:
I don’t know, but that’s interesting
is a perfectly intelligent conclusion.
There’s More Happening Than the Eclipse
Today’s eclipse isn’t happening by itself astrologically.
Jupiter entered Leo on June 30 and remains there until July 26, 2027. In astrology, Jupiter is associated with expansion, optimism, confidence and growth; astrologers interpret Jupiter in Leo as amplifying creativity, courage, generosity and self-expression, with ego and excess representing the other side of that coin. (Cafe Astrology)
Then there’s Uranus and Pluto.
They formed an exact trine in July 2026 and will meet in that same harmonious aspect four more times through May 2028. Astrologically, Uranus is associated with disruption, innovation and liberation, while Pluto is associated with power, transformation and deep structural change. (The Astro Academy)
Some astrologers connect this current configuration with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s and interpret the present trine as another chapter in themes that became highly visible then: social change, challenges to authority, liberation movements and experimentation with alternative ways of living.
I wouldn’t call that a prediction. I’d call it a fascinating historical question.
What happens when ideas planted by one generation become infrastructure for another?
Now that is something I want to watch.
And Then There’s the Eclipse Itself
A solar eclipse temporarily interrupts the light. Think about that symbolically for a minute.
Something we’ve depended on being visible suddenly isn’t. The landscape looks different. Then the light comes back. There’s something beautiful about that. Because sometimes we don’t realize what we’ve been depending on until it disappears.
A relationship.
A job.
A title.
Live Like the Future Is Familiar
Money.
Attention.
A routine.
Someone’s approval.
An identity.
Maybe darkness doesn’t always arrive to punish us. Sometimes it reveals what we’ve been using as our light. And with this eclipse happening in Leo, the astrological sign associated with identity and visibility, I keep coming back to one question:
Who are you when nobody is applauding?
Not your title.
Not your résumé.
Not your relationship status.
Not your follower count.
Not who everyone expects you to be.
You.
Who is that person?
This Is Where the Cycle Becomes Personal
The Full Buck Moon I wrote about in July had me thinking about growth differently.
Instead of asking, What should I start? I was thinking:
What has already grown? What has matured? What am I strong enough to carry now? What doesn’t require another explanation? What have I finally learned?
This eclipse feels like the next question in that conversation.
Okay. Now that you know, what are you going to do differently?
Because awareness without changed behavior eventually becomes another cycle.
And some cycles aren’t meant to be repeated.
They’re meant to be completed.
Maybe Growth Isn’t Always About Doing More
One part of the spiritual interpretations surrounding this period really stuck with me: the idea of releasing perfectionism, overworking and guilt around rest.
Forget astrology for a second. We need to talk about those points I mentioned. We live in a culture that has become incredibly good at making exhaustion look impressive.
Work harder.
Post more.
Build faster.
Respond immediately.
Turn the hobby into a business.
Turn the vacation into content.
Turn your healing into content.
Turn your life into content.
Optimize everything.
Even “self-improvement” can become exhausting. Maybe growth doesn’t always mean adding something.
Maybe sometimes growth sounds like:
Enough.
Enough explaining.
Enough performing.
Enough rescuing.
Enough forcing.
Enough proving.
Enough trying to keep alive things that only survive because you’re doing all the work.
That’s growth too.
Communication Has Cycles
And this is where all of this comes home for Beauty of Communications.
Communication has seasons.
There’s a time to speak.
A time to listen.
A time to explain.
A time to negotiate.
A time to apologize.
A time to repair.
A time to advocate.
A time to ask another question.
And yes, sometimes there’s a time to stop talking.
Not every misunderstanding requires another paragraph.
Not every person who misunderstands you needs to be convinced.
Not every relationship needs one more conversation.
Not every criticism requires a response.
Communication maturity isn’t just knowing what to say.
It’s knowing when the communication cycle itself is finished.
Silence communicates.
Distance communicates.
Consistency communicates.
Boundaries communicate.
Behavior communicates.
Sometimes changing what you do says everything another thousand words couldn’t.
Find Your People! But Know the Difference Between People and an Audience
If Aquarius represents the collective, then I think this part matters. We hear find your tribe so often that it’s almost become wallpaper.
But genuine community is different from popularity. I don’t need everybody. I need people who can build. People who bring information.
Ideas.
Resources.
Perspective.
Accountability.
Opportunity.
Care.
And I need to be willing to bring those things too.
Maybe the future isn’t about one brilliant person standing at the front of the room telling everybody what to do.
Maybe it’s about rooms filled with capable people who know how to connect their gifts.
Leo says:
Here’s my light.
Aquarius asks:
Okay. What can we illuminate together?
I love that.
Another spiritual idea I came across suggests imagining the future not as something far away that you’re desperately trying to attract, but almost like a memory, something familiar enough that you can feel yourself living inside it.
I don’t know that imagining something literally rearranges the universe. But I do understand what happens when you make a future familiar enough that your present behavior starts matching it.
Instead of constantly asking:
What life do I want someday?
Work on asking:
How does the person capable of sustaining that life behave today?
How do they communicate?
What do they tolerate?
How do they manage money?
Who gets access to them?
What does their morning look like?
What kind of relationships surround them?
What do they do when they’re disappointed?
Suddenly manifestation becomes less about wishing.
It becomes practice.
Hold Your Note
One metaphor from my research has stayed with me. Think about an opera singer holding a note. Everything around the singer can move.
The orchestra changes.
The room changes.
Other voices enter.
But that singer knows the note she’s responsible for holding.
Maybe that’s what these strange, fast changing times require from us. Not predicting everything. Not controlling everything.
Not panicking every time something changes.
Just knowing what we’re responsible for holding.
The Integrity.
Joy.
Curiosity.
Discipline.
Compassion.
Boundaries.
Courage.
Community.
Whatever your note is……
hold it.
Not because holding a certain “frequency” guarantees that the universe will give you what you want. Hold it because consistency shapes character. And character shapes decisions. And decisions eventually shape lives.
The Beauty of Cycles
Maybe that’s what I’m learning from all of this.
Cycles aren’t interesting because they tell us exactly what’s going to happen. They’re interesting because they give us another way to ask:
Where am I right now?
Some cycles tell us to begin.
Some tell us to build.
Some tell us to rest.
Some tell us to speak.
Some tell us to listen.
Some tell us to release.
And sometimes life brings us back to an old question simply to see whether we’re finally ready to give it a different answer.
The eclipse will pass. The Moon will keep moving.
The planets will continue their orbits.
Technology will evolve.
Institutions will change.
Communities will reorganize.
People will come and go.
And we’re going to change too.
We don’t control the cycle.
But we do get some say in who we are while we’re moving through it.
The Beauty of Cycles Reflection
So here’s what I’m sitting with during this one:
What keeps showing up in my life that I might finally be ready to understand differently?
Where am I confusing visibility with impact?
What am I forcing because I’m afraid of what happens if I stop?
Which relationships, habits or systems keep me operating in survival mode?
What does joy look like when I don’t make myself earn it first?
Who are the people I can actually build with?
What future am I preparing myself to sustain?
And maybe the question underneath all of them:
When the light changes, who do I choose to become?
Because maybe the beauty of a cycle isn’t that history repeats itself.
Maybe the beauty is realizing that we don’t have to.
The Beauty of Cycles is a recurring Beauty of Communications series exploring the rhythms and patterns that shape communication, culture, relationships, leadership, nature, and everyday life.
Leave a comment