The Fish, the Dove, & Life After Death
Chapter 113
The Fish, the Dove,
& Life After Death
The story for the Scorpio full moon eclipse time:
May 5 - May 18, 2023
Approximately 7,000 years ago, a tree was planted in the Jordan Valley.
Today, the tree is just a pile of charcoal, but those charcoal flakes were all scientists needed to determine that it was once a vibrant, fruiting thing, producing olives in a land where previously, no olives had ever grown.
The intentional planting of olives is the oldest known example of the domestication of fruit trees. It was, perhaps, the start of the very first orchard, near the banks of the Jordan River, just south of the Sea of Galilee.
I was reading about this when an article on the right side of the page jumped out at me. It was highlighting a small study that had just been published by the University of Michigan, and it was titled: “Evidence of conscious-like activity in the dying brain.”
The study was so small that you probably haven’t heard of it. It didn’t make a dent in the news, and had I not been researching the origin of orchards on this particular morning - just hours after the study was released - then I imagine I never would have heard of it either.
But there it was, staring up at me: newly released scientific evidence pointing to the possibility of life after death.
Part I:
The Dying Brain
Four dying patients agreed to have their brainwaves monitored to the very end. Following cardiac arrest, they were determined to be beyond medical intervention, and so, their loved ones made the difficult decision to take them off life support.
Then, shortly after the plug was pulled, something astonishing was recorded: a flash of electricity, a burst of consciousness, a gasp of life.
Just before death, a great big rush of gamma waves flooded the region of the brain that is often associated with dreams, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness.
Could this be why certain people describe seeing bright light and other visuals during near-death experiences? Could it be that those experiences are simply the consequence of a surge of activity in this region of the brain? Or could this final mark of consciousness point to something very real that’s happening in the world and being witnessed at the moment of death?
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been described by countless people from every culture for seemingly as long as people have been writing things down with paper and pen. The experiences have occurred in people regardless of religious upbringing and personal belief. They appear to be equally common in both the devout and the atheistic, and the experiences themselves never seem particularly tied to one religion or another. In other words, NDEs are by and large universal. And while many (maybe even most) NDEs describe something very similar - a blissful bright light and the end of all pain - other NDEs are dark and frightening.
To date, there’s no way to say if something different is happening in the brain during the bright light experience versus the dark and scary experience, but interestingly, of the four people from the recent study, two experienced the intense, final rush of brain activity while the other two participants experienced no such rush. Instead, when they were removed from life support, their brains simply signed off and all activity stopped.
Because all four of these people died (my condolences to their families and gratitude to them for gifting their brainwaves to science), there’s no way to know what they were personally experiencing in those final moments. Perhaps it was blissful and bright, perhaps it was dark and scary, or perhaps it was something else altogether. Ultimately, the study was far too small to draw any major conclusions, but it does offer us new information.
It proves that at least for some people, there is a surge of brain activity just before death. This brain activity is incredibly fast, featuring waves associated with consciousness, and it happens in an area of the brain that’s previously been tied to visual hallucinations and mystical states.
While this new information doesn’t tell us why this happens, it does provide quantifiable evidence that something mysterious is happening when we die.
Some rush of energy is being registered, and where it goes from there, we will likely never truly know until we cross that threshold ourselves. But it’s always seemed to me that it must go somewhere. For energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be transformed again and again and again, ad infinitum.
Part II:
The Fruits of Your Labor
Every piece of fruit was once a flower. The bloom giving way to something delicious.
This is what I saw in my mind the evening of the hybrid solar eclipse: flowers turning into fruit.
Not just on one tree, but across an entire orchard. The accompanying fruit runneth over countless woven baskets. Far too many apples for any one person to eat. Apples for all the world!
If you were standing next to me now, I’d hand you one. Thinking: this fruit was once a flower.
The blooming is not the pinnacle of our bounty. It is the precursor. The thing that’s required in order for the tree to fruit.
It’s fruiting now. At a crossroads, the orchard swells.
☆
On May 5, 2023, at 1:34 PM EST, the earth is passing between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow ever so slightly across the moon’s surface and partially dimming the sun’s reflected light.
This penumbral lunar eclipse is happening at 14°58’ Scorpio, and it is the final Scorpio eclipse in a series of three that started on May 16, 2022.
I saw it in my mind like this: a whirring energy spiraling up in the shape of a triangle - for delta, for change - and this period of time now? It was resting at the very top:
This eclipse period takes us from May 5th to May 18th, or as I like to think of it: from my mother’s birthday to my half.
With every moon and every cycle, there are likely little things like this that seem significant just to you. Maybe it’s in the timing of the dates or a certain word or image in the story here, and always, it is witnessed in the actual events and circumstances of your life. Those things that are uniquely true just for you. From the secret, private information that’s moving through your mind to the people you encounter to the events on your calendar, you are having your own experience.
But your unique situation is not unfolding in isolation. Rather, it is held in the current of a collective wave, a pulsing of life that moves through each and every one of us, and during each cycle, it is this wave to which you are responding.
Imagine now: an orchard of trees.
Each tree has different marks on its bark, different curves in its branches, a different number of flowers blooming at different times, and eventually, fruiting at different times as well. Some trees may even be struggling with varying degrees of infection that require extra care, and some may fail to bloom or fruit at all in a given year. In other words, each tree is unique, but also, all the trees are connected by a host of shared circumstances: the temperature of the air, the movement of the wind, the rain, the sun, and the mycorrhizal fungi passing information between their roots.
You are like a tree in a collective orchard, and over the last 1.5 years, we have all been affected by the spiralic triangle of transformation pictured above.
To trace your unique pattern of growth during this time, I encourage you to reflect on the following dates. I am calling these The Delta Dates. Together, they connect the three Scorpio eclipses and help inform this period of time now: the peak of your transformation, a fruitful bounteous moment that in many ways may feel like being given new life after death.
☆
THE Δ DATES
of Scorpio Eclipses
#1
May 16 - May 29, 2022
eclipse at 25°18′ Scorpio
#2
October 25 - November 22, 2022
eclipse at 2°00′ Scorpio
#3
May 5 - May 18, 2023
eclipse at 14°52′ Scorpio
+ A Foreshadowing Event(s)
November 4 - November 18, 2021
☆
This is what I saw: flowers turning into fruit.
And on this full moon eclipse, the moon will be conjunct the asteroid Pomona, named after the goddess of fruit trees whose name quite literally means “to take the fruit.” As in, you don’t just grow it, but you take it from the branch and enjoy it.
Simultaneously, the sun is conjunct the asteroid Doris, whose name means “bounty.”
What will you collect? Or rather, what will appear before you as freely and naturally as a fruit grows from a flower - waiting and wanting to be eaten, knowing that through your enjoyment, its seeds will spread?
Though, it is interesting that in my vision and in the mythology of Pomona, the focus is not on wild fruit trees, but rather, on domesticated orchards. The fruit that’s ready to be enjoyed required some labor on your part. You didn’t just stumble upon it. You planted something. You tended to it. Perhaps for years.
Most fruit trees do not produce any fruit at all for the first three to six years. But now, THE FRUIT IS HERE.
It’s time! It’s fruiting!
Enjoy!!
Part III:
A Dove, A Fish
This is what happened: I placed the image of Pomona above. I closed my computer. I spent the evening with my husband and fell asleep by 9:30 PM. Then, at some point over the next eight hours, there was a spike of activity in the region of my brain responsible for dreaming. Of course, no electrodes were attached to my head, and there’s no way to know for sure what was happening beneath my skull, but I do remember what I experienced. I know what I saw:
I was standing in a clearing in the woods. My feet fully shoed, pressed against the dirt. I was looking at a large tree stump - three to four feet in diameter - when a white dove came and landed on it. But I couldn’t tell for sure. Was it a dove? My view was blocked by the new growth rising from the stump, a new tree reaching up towards the sky and thriving despite its peculiar location. I stepped around the trunk to get a closer look at the bird, but when I did, my feet lifted from the ground, and suddenly, I was floating in the air.
To my left, I saw another bird fly beside me and instantly transform, its grey feathers bursting into green-brown scales that covered the body of a large bass. The bass began swimming through the air towards me, and my body floated away from the stump to make way for the fish. At first, I was frightened. I seemed to have lost control over my body, and now it was moving as if by some great force far more powerful than I.
I sensed I had been transported, as if through some sort of vision quest. As it was happening, that’s what I told myself: This is a vision quest, relax.
I softened into the experience. I floated there and watched as the fish curved towards me through the dry air that was now behaving like water, and that was it. That was my vision quest: a dove turning into a fish. Land behaving like water.
As I type that now, I think of the sun and moon during this penumbral eclipse - one in the earth sign of Taurus, the other in the water sign of Scorpio. I think of how symbolically, land represents our earthly experience, and water represents our spiritual one. I think of what it might mean for the land to turn to water, earth to spirit. I think of life and death.
But I wasn’t thinking of any of this when I first woke from the dream and searched “dove turning into a fish.” I was curious if this image existed somewhere in the collective body of myths, and I soon found myself reading a piece titled “FISH AND DOVE.” It was published by Southern Illinois University, and this line from the first page grabbed my attention:
“Hierapolis in Syria, a few miles west of the upper Euphrates on the road toward Antioch, was the center of a popular cult devoted to Istar, the great mother-goddess and Queen of Heaven. [The author] Lucian calls her the Syrian Hera (or Juno) and claims that there is no more venerable, ‘nor any holier place in the world’ than Hierapolis. It is remarkable that both the pigeon and the fish sacred to Istar of Hierapolis reappear in the same close union in the Christian catacombs.”
Ishtar…
I googled her name plus the word “asteroid,” learned that she has an asteroid named after her, and entered it into my software. That’s when I saw that the asteroid Ishtar is in the exact place in the sky on May 5th as this full moon: 14°52′ Scorpio.
☆
While still asleep on May 3, 2023, I saw the symbols of the goddess Ishtar. I saw them while my brain was in the altered state of dreaming, and who’s to say why I saw them except that I did. Except that they correspond to the position of the planets during the very eclipse I was in the process of writing about. It’s almost as though, in that moment, Spirit descended to Earth. My physical body became awash in water, and I bore witness to this event in maybe the only way that my mind could make sense of it.
☆
The earth is changing.
Our understanding of the earth is changing.
Its very core now full of something that previously we didn’t even know was there.
I heard that this would happen. In January 2022, I closed my eyes and heard the words: THERE WILL BE MAGIC.
“It will penetrate down to the core of the earth, anchoring itself.
Once it reaches the core, IT FILLS IT COMPLETELY.
After [the changes to the core of the earth], the energy then begins to grow, reaching back out towards the surface of the earth where - towards the end of the cycle - it will sprout, eventually growing tall and strong on the surface of the earth. I’m seeing this as a TREE.
LUSH, GREEN, BEAUTIFUL, MAGICAL - FRUITFUL.
This brings an experience of the spiritual on Earth.”
These words moved through as part of a larger story describing the cycle of Scorpio and Taurus eclipses that began in 2022 and that are reaching their conclusion now (save for a final Taurus eclipse in October).
Looking back at this passage, I can’t help but think how the synchronicity of it all is interesting - down to the use of the word “fruitful,” separated out on its own like that. And I’m led to believe what I’m often led to believe: that outward appearances are deceiving. That something much bigger and more magical and beautiful is weaving through everything in ways that most of the time, we fail to see, but then, it happens. A flash of electricity, a burst of consciousness, a bolt of light that breaks through the clouds so we can SEE.
Ultimately, that’s what this time is about: a moment of sight that changes your experience on Earth. Perhaps this is experienced as a flash of insight or perhaps it’s seen in a dream or maybe, it’s been slowly unfolding over the course of the last year, peeling back the layers of your mind like the skin of an onion.
However it comes, it seems to me that there may come a time when “heaven” is so close you can reach out and touch it. If and when that moment arrives, you might feel scared or overwhelmed. Perhaps then, you gently remind yourself that you can trust what’s happening, that the world is not out to get you, that there is so much more at play in this great mystery than we will ever know, and when things get hard and scary, all you have to do is simply observe what life has to teach you.
I sense that this period - from May 5th to May 18th - will take us back and forth between worlds as if we’re living on a swinging pendulum between waking and dreaming, living and dying, and by the end of the period, you just may find that the pendulum has stopped swinging, that’s it’s become perfectly balanced between two points, and when you get your bearings and whenever you’re ready, you will see that you have been reborn inside a flourishing orchard where the trees are full of fruit, and all you have to do is walk up to one, pick a former flower, dust the dirt from its skin, and if you want to, take a big, juicy bite.
☆
To be continued…
Long Story Short:
This Scorpio eclipse is leading us to the end of a year-long transformation that has transpired as part of multiple larger cycles - stretching back in time to November 2021. By the end of this period - approximately May 18th - you may feel completely reborn. Like you’ve been slowly crawling out of your shell for the last year, but now you are standing on both legs. You are standing strong. You are seeing the beauty in everything always, and you are able to find JOY in the bounty of this earth, this life. The small magic in every detail, and the big magic of simply existing. What a gift! To be in this form now. To be at this place now. To watch the world unfold around you, constantly shifting like a kaleidoscope. To see how you too have changed and are changing. To see that throughout it all, you have worked and created something that’s worthy of enjoying. This life! Your greatest creation yet.
The Tip Jar
The Magic Guide is a calling I answer every time I sit to write. Every month, I spend 50+ hours creating it, and I couldn’t do it without you. If you’re enjoying The Magic Guide, please help contribute to its continued creation. Thank you.
