My Hand in the Lion's Mouth
A story for the Leo Solar Eclipse: on Regulus, spiritual inflation, and the difference between flight and flapping
I had worn the story so many times now, it had gone smooth as a river stone in my palm.
I used to perform my life. Now I live it, I’d say, and something in me would preen a little, hearing it said aloud, the way a bird preens not from vanity but from some older instinct, some need to check the feathers are still there, still whole, still mine.
But a woman can polish a stone so long she forgets it was ever rough. I forget, some days, that there was a day the water was cold, and I went under, and did not know if I would come up again.
But the opening is the easy part. Any door can be blown open by a strong enough wind. It’s the tending of an open door through weather, through boredom, through the long gray Mondays when nothing is happening and no one is watching that is the actual work, and I did not want to hear that, least of all from myself.
Nine months back, I had gone under. A breathing circle, a retreat I’d nearly turned around and left twice, and then, on the second night, something in my chest came loose the way a knot comes loose after years of being pulled the wrong direction. I wept for forty minutes. Not sadness. Pressure finding a door. No one could tell me that hadn’t happened. It had.
What I built after, though, was my own hands’ work, and my hands, like my grandmother’s, do not know how to sit idle around a holy thing. My grandmother kept hens, forty of them, on land in the hill country, and I remember, as a girl, watching her hands moving through the coop at dusk, quick, sure, unsentimental, counting heads, checking for blood, closing the latch against the fox that circled every night just past the fence line. You tend what feeds you, she used to say, or it stops feeding you and starts just being noise in a box. I hadn’t thought of those hens in twenty years. I think of them now only because, somewhere in the last nine months, I started keeping my own kind of coop, a Thursday circle, eleven women, cushions on my living room floor, and had never once asked myself whether I was tending it or performing it.
Tonight there would be Reiki, and a card pulled from the deck that had belonged to no one before me, and a small altar with my grandmother’s photograph propped against a candle, because eclipses, I’d read somewhere, were good nights for the ancestors to lean in close. I believed this the way I believe most things lately: fully, loudly, and without testing a single edge of it against my own bones.
I shuffled the deck before the women arrived and drew, for myself, alone, before anyone could see my face do whatever it was about to do: Strength. The woman with her hand in the lion’s mouth, gentling it, not fighting it. I looked at the card a long moment. I did not, in that moment, ask myself which one of them I actually was — the woman, steady-handed, or the lion, starved for something and dressed up as calm.
The circle filled in around eight. Reiki symbols were placed. Someone lit sage without asking, the way people do in rooms that have decided they’re allowed to. And it was Priya, new, quiet, a nurse, her third time in the circle, who asked the question that would not have unmade a smaller performance, but unmade mine.
“How did you know it was real? Not just… a feeling that passed?”
I opened my mouth for the smooth stone of an answer, and found my hand had gone to my sternum instead, an old animal gesture, the body checking itself for wounds before the mind has finished deciding there’s a threat. Nothing organized came out of me. I heard myself say something about somatic truth, heard how thin it sounded even to my own ear, and laughed, too bright, too fast, a hen startled off her nest, and covered the laugh with a line I was almost certain belonged to my teacher, not to me.
Priya nodded, kindly, the way you nod at someone you’ve just watched flinch. The circle moved on without incident, folding the moment back into the evening the way water folds back over a dropped stone. But I sat inside my own ringing hollowness and understood, for one bare second, that I had gotten remarkably good at describing an open door while never once checking, lately, whether anything was still moving through it.
I thought of my grandmother’s hands in the coop at dusk. Of the fox that circled every night, patient, uninterested in speeches, only in what was left unlatched. I had not slept properly in three nights. No one in that soft-lit room knew it, because I had told all of them, in one language or another, that I was fine — better than fine, held, becoming — while my own body sat under me like a starved thing nobody had thought to feed.
I did not stop the circle to say any of this. That confession, if it ever comes, will come later, smaller, unwitnessed, some ordinary Tuesday with no candles lit, no one to perform transformation for. Tonight I only felt the fox pass close along my own fence line, testing the latch, and noted (the way my grandmother would have noted it, flatly, without drama) that something in the coop had gone unattended for longer than I wanted to admit.
I finished the reading. My voice, when I want it to, still knows exactly how to sound like a woman with her hand steady in the lion’s mouth. I was not lying, exactly, when I sounded that way. I just hadn’t earned it every night. Only some.
Reading the Sky
This year’s Leo Solar Eclipse falls at 20° Leo, conjunct the South Node, one degree shy of the Sabian symbol for Leo 21°: intoxicated chickens, dizzily flapping their wings, trying to fly. It is a picture of the ego meeting something real before it has learned what to do with real things — mimicking flight, because flight is what it saw, without yet having grown the wing for it.
The South Node sits on Regulus, the star of kings, which has never once been shy about the difference between wearing a crown and carrying what the crown is for. And trine to the Eclipse, unhurried, sits Saturn retrograde in Aries: not a punishment, just an old latch, still there, asking to be checked.
This is the first story in a small mythology we’ll be building slowly, across the coming six months, toward a Leo Full Moon that has not happened yet — where a different door, and a much harder leaving, is waiting for Coral.