HEARTROOT Approaching the Winter Solstice
Here we are again, in the last days and hours of our annual descent into Darkness.
The darkness is so very deep here at Heartroot, under clouded skies, cloaking the still snow-less fields. Even our donkey-friend, Arthur, has stopped his nightly neighbour-rousing ruckus. The porch, the rocking-chair and I are enveloped in the kind of atmospheric blackness reserved for foreshadowing tales of horror and ill omens… or being lost at sea. I know Attila is beside me only because I can hear him whimpering as he chases a marmotte or a skunk in his dreams….
Yet…I feel radiant with a disconcerting, cellular peace.
We’ve learned to be so frightened of the Dark – the unseen, unknown…. Ce qu’on ne peut pas saisir – what we can’t see and grab hold of…what we can’t dominate with our muscles, judgements or rationale. Is this not the genesis of our concepts of Evil and Good? Can we not find, in our relationship with the Dark, the foundation for our fear of The Other?
What is not familiar (from “family”) – what our eyes and brains have not registered over and over until we adopt an attitude of lazy insouciance – makes us alert. The hormonal cocktail served in the face of the Unseen/Unknown is laced with adrenaline and testosterone – we are suspicious, ready to pounce or flee. We are Hunter or the Hunted….
The religions of the northern hemisphere run on solar-powered Sons. We have focussed on these darkening times as a test of our Faith that the Light will indeed return.
But…what if we were to not experience Darkness – or being Light, 
incarnate in a material body; or the powerful, uncomfortable emotions that arise from these bodies – as something to escape? What if we instead found within the black, velvety Void, the Source of all potential – the Womb of Creation – and revelled in this opportunity to become conscious Creators of our destiny?
Children under the age of three who have near-death experiences do not see the infamous brilliant white Light, but rather an enveloping black fire that does not burn (see the work of PMH Atwater), well-known to Kabbalists, Buddhists, Sufis…to mystics of all stripes through space and time.
We are aware now of the Zero Point unlimited potential of not-yet-manifest Reality – and then there was Light! Perhaps when we learn to become very externally still, allowing ourselves the adventuring exhilaration of the inner voyage, the darkness outside loses its power to terrify.
When we stop running around filling every nook and crevice of our lives with Stuff to do and acquire, and allow ourselves the natural process of releasing what no long serves, fear-fed demons rise from the depths where we have kept them chained. All the things we have learned and believed about ourselves that we’ve hidden in our bellies – in our cellular memories – with shame (I will never be Enough; I am unlovable; I will always be alone….), scramble to the surface of our consciousness. I believe we are able now to choose to bless our wounding, and let it go.
On the level of the collective unconscious of humanity, we can clearly see all that has been suppressed, all that has been ignored and denied, rising into manifestation in perfect parallel to the process in our individual lives and bodies. Apocalyptic visions of every tint and texture swirl through and around us. Our challenge, I believe, is to let them go as well. Duality and destruction, strange as it may seem to some, are a question of personal choice – of free will.
I am startled to realise that this deep peace that has flowered in me was seeded in the dark. It seems so obvious, now that I …see it! Although I know that at some point soon the Light will return and grow, I’m not waiting for it.
Mmmmmmm. I hum to resonate every cell in my being. I see and feel a pillar of crystalline energy joining the Heart of Gaia and the Heart of the Multiverse through my human Heart. In this place of neither Light nor Dark, I dissolve into Peace….
Blessèd Solstice….
Blessèd Be….
Hither & Yon... 