Up with the dog at the dawn of New Year’s Eve
The turning of the calendar – the man-made calendar, the calendar that was superimposed on the earth.
The new year in the celtic world, from which my ancestors come, would be Samhain, the end of October. The year begins with the last harvest and the descent into darkness.
It’s only a couple of months difference, but ideologically much farther away from our modern calendar which seems to indicate an end in the darkness.
It says something, to me anyway, about the relationship my ancestors had with the natural world and the acknowledgment or maybe reverence of the wisdom and potency of the darkness.
The darkness is the beginning, it is that from which everything comes.
Seeds in the dark ground.
Babies in the darkness of the womb.
Revelations arriving out of difficulty and tumultuous times.
Creation out of the primordial darkness soup.
Something emerging from a seeming nothing.
But we know, the dark is not nothing
Alchemy is happening in the dark.
Sparks of creative elements exist in readiness in the dark.
And this isn’t to glorify or paint a pretty picture of the dark.
There’s darkness that people don’t return from. We know that all too well.
There’s darkness that doesn’t reveal light in the way that transforms it.
There’s dark shit that no amount of creativity and light can undo or make not have happened.
There’s darkness that doesn’t need to be filtered or burdened by an expectation of a healing to come.
Darkness happens. It exists.
And sometimes it is part of a cycle of emergence. And sometimes it’s unbearable.
And sometimes we find ways to bear the unbearable anyway.
And sometimes in the bearing, something else comes forth.
Whenever we sense our beginning, our personal turn of the year, may we be held by something or someone or somewhere that helps us bear the unbearable. And may we be mirrored and uplifted in our joy and radiance.
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