The Dance of Darkness
Happy Monday and Happy Halloween!
This is the morning sky, the break of day through my window. Strangely and uncharacteristically, this cross-quarter day crept up on me! (pun intended) The Fall this year here in the Northern hemisphere has been precipitous and dramatic, colorful and sharp, bringing wind, rain and the glorious light of death. I do mean glorious. And I do mean death, though I don’t necessarily mean physical death.
Glorious is realizing the way you have lurked in shadows, hidden in the bushes, and now suddenly finding you are unafraid to bask in the sunshine. Glorious is the way the words finally show up to share the depth and intensity of your heart. Glorious is knowing you are fragile, temporal and full of life.
Death, then, is the way you finally decide to care for your heart, determining to cast aside anything that blocks your light. Death is the moment when you no longer hesitate to step fully into the shadow, knowing all possibilities lurk there. And death is embracing the going to quiet, to stillness, to reflection over action.
The movement of light, the dance of the sun and the earth, play with me. They play with my psyche and my physical self provoking both joy and irritation. My body can be irritable, increasingly more needy of attentive care. But my psyche is ever more curious as the dance becomes more seductive, more vigorous, more willful in its ways, the environment around me dictating more and more about my daily activities.
In this passionate dance, the call to bring the light home, the heat to your core is strong, awakening the desire for food, companionship, music, love. In many ways, it is easy to heed the call of light, it connects us, animates us. But the call to tend to the shadows, to reckon with the darkness can be equally powerful. To heed the call of darkness can be a radical gesture and maybe one seen only by yourself.
Both darkness and light are equally nourishing. Both are necessary, inseparable even and ever-present.
Tomorrow, in honor of this dance, I am offering divinations. Divinations are way to see into the dance at a given moment, to begin to divine your own way in collaboration with the elements, the planets and your very own body. Just like being here with me on Mondays, you never know what might arise, a trick, a treat, a taste of something sweet! Learn more here or just go here to schedule a session.
Maybe you can treat yourself!