It is late October. The Great Wheel turns. Many different cultures around the world all seem to be celebrating the same thing: The movement from Light into Darkness. The Indian Holiday of Diwali, the Gaelic festival of Samhain, the Mexican Dia de los Muertos… All are iterations of our shared human relationship with the cycles of nature.
Here are some words from the wonderful Douglas Brooks on this time of year…
“From light to dark, plenty to scarcity, warmth to cold, this is a seam in the fabric of nature that we celebrate. It is provoked by nature’s cycles, drawn into our individual psyches, pushed through the crucibles of culture and religion in order to create meaning. Across cultures there is a response to nature’s chronic entropy; our individual human experience as somatic and reflective beings too moves through these same cycles of time and environment. This is the time of the year when we (in the northern hemisphere particularly) ask to thrive as we pass through the ordinary natural processes that would otherwise signal depletion rather than growth; this is culture’s way of turning to invite the darkness and even the shadows, the beings of the underworld (and the saints too), to join in the process of exchange and mutual interest, this is the time when we offer treats and aver the tricks. Well, hopefully. We perform locative rituals, the kinds that reorient and reconstruct relationships with time, healing the darkness with light, the bitter with the sweet, and we address the needs of all hungry embodied and disembodied beings. This is what Diwali is about, as a victory of light and the newness of fabric, the Celtic new year as an encounter with the opening in time, what we call Halloween now: this is how we address our human condition with a mythic consciousness eye towards the spiritual encounters that come from our relationships with nature, culture, and conscience. Happy Diwali and soon, happy Halloween too. It’s all of a piece, buried in our humanity far below the surfaces of history’s disparate expressions.”
On October 23rd, 2014 we also had a solar eclipse. Yet another potent mythical and astrological sign of darkness swallowing the light. Astrologically, eclipses are said to be amplifiers and accelerators of change and transformation. If we choose to align with the cycles of nature at this time, we can be sure our inner alchemy will be deep and powerful. Now is a time of death and dissolution. It is also a time when spirit world is easier to access from our known living world. Your guides and ancestors draw near. Do not be afraid. Be open to receive the messages. What are you prepared to release? What parts of your life are no longer serving you? At this time of year you can consciously choose to release that which needs to be released into the jaws of the Dark Goddess herself. From her womb all things arise, and all things return. She is fierce and terrifying, but she is also LOVE and TRUTH.
So set an intention in your heart. Light a candle. Prepare to enter the underworld. You may be invited to die and rot there.. Rejoice in your process of decomposing! For soon you will be reborn. These dark steps on the spiritual path are only happening in service of the highest self. We are being tempered like a steel sword by fire and mallet! The process is intense but the result is fine, strong, and pure.