The Body as Altar
Letter Five | Moon Five: A descent into flesh, feeling, and eclipse-born knowing.
Dear you,
Today, the new moon passed before the sun.
A solar eclipse, a veil to reveal. Eclipses have long been seen as thresholds, invitations to see the hidden, to feel what’s usually drowned out by brightness, where knowing settles deeper than language. Every cycle has a moment when the spiral turns, not backward, but inward, a soft descent and grounding, coming home to flesh.
Question: Can we meet the feminine and the sacred in blood and bone?
The body is an altar, living and real. May I suggest that the sacred feminine lives not only in myth and mysticism but also in the slip of blood between thighs, in the spine's slow uncurling after sleep, in the bruise on your ankle, the rumbling of hunger, the vibration of desire, or the stillness of grief. Your body is the echo of a thousand women who came before you - When I was in labour with my first child, I felt the presence of countless women standing behind me, quiet, steady. It was one of the most profound moments of my life, as if I were being held by a lineage.
This eclipse and the new moon reminds me to honour the currents and shifts within me rather than override them, to embrace the flow not as a burden to manage or hide, but as a sacred rhythm…
Like it matters.
Like it’s sacred.
Like the moon is watching.
Question: What truths are surfacing in our shared silence, under the gaze of this eclipse?
Maybe it’s time I asked my body what it knows. Not what it looks like or how it performs. But what it knows, deep in the marrow, deep in the womb, deep in the gut. Where I feel expansion, the parts of me that want to rest, move, soften. This isn’t metaphor, it’s a map. The sacred feminine isn’t symbolic, it’s sensory, it is real.
“I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed.
For where I am closed, I am false.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Thank You for reading
Claire
Postscript : 🌑 Eclipse Ritual
Just this:
Sit somewhere quiet.
Place a hand on your belly. The other on your heart.
Breathe.
Ask: What sensation is asking to be felt all the way through?
Listen with the whole body.
Maybe it's your feet.
Maybe it's the ache behind your eyes.
Maybe it's the part of you that hasn't been touched in months.
That’s the altar.
Tend it.
