The Long Dark

Almost daily I pray to seven directions, inviting the different energies they can bring to support us all, in our waking up and beginning, bringing us warmth and nourishment, finding the joy of letting go and nourishing each other’s roots and the soil, connecting with our inner wisdom, compassion, love, being part of the web of life, being part of this planet, connected, belonging… and among them, the energy of the dark, that Fruitful Darkness, the natural dying and composting that Modernity seems to fear so much, perhaps we, too, fear so much.  Yet, certain things can only happen in the darkness, or happen best in the darkness…  This year I’ve enjoyed the true darkness of night, far from electric lights.  And now enjoy the long darkness of the North, nighttime by four pm.  Darkness can be protection, intimacy, the place where we can fully share our hearts, where smell, sound, touch become so alive.  The sweet darkness of eyes closed when lips meet.  And the acrid darkness of eyes closed as bombs fall.  I miss the darkness of my youth, before we were told that Fear had brought electricity everywhere—but it was not Fear, he came later, it was Greed.

In the dark
no colour separates us
our hearts beat
we’re everywhere

May you find something nourishing in here…

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Offerings

Council Journey Two new Council Journeys – starting December 28th (Thursdays, three more participants needed) and January 6th (Saturdays, four more participants needed)

A Council Way into our Full Humanity  New dates for Council, until the End of 2023. 

Saturday 20th – Sunday 21st January 2024: Loving Life, Welcoming Grief. A space for grief and love.  With Jeremy Thres and myself.

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The Long Dark.

Francis Weller says that we’re entering The Long Dark: “a time of decay, a time of collapse, a time of endings, a time of sheddings. These are necessary. We are seeing this last gasp effort to try to uphold the old structures. Keep capitalism going. Keep the stock market inflated. They’re all going to collapse. They have to, because the system is unsustainable. Not only in terms of world resources, but just in terms of human capacity to endure that kind of emptiness.”

Oh yes.

Years ago I got into watching Zombie stuff.  What called me into that was not the abundance of horror or the gore or the violence.  But the fact that most structures of Modernity had collapsed.  The land left to thrive, nature repurposing cities, concrete being slowly but surely composted back to something that can support life in a true sense.  And, uppermostly, the collapse of the parasitic structures that keep us separate from accessing land and having food security, the structures that keep us separate and separating from each other.  The possibility of actually working the basics.  Of course, in those things I watched there was no happy ending, Modernity still entrenched in people’s minds (is that perhaps what Zombies are after?)…

What if the Long Dark—the Great Unravelling, the Simplification, the Forgetting, the Remembering—is that Fruitful Darkness, that time where we can let go of our unhealthy structures, compost, let the soil of our lives get on with its work, let our roots connect and make love and thrive, discover our own abundance when we touch the balance between doing and being… 

What if in the Long Dark we finally let go of the illusion of scarcity that is the backbone of Modernity, if we soften our ingrained sense of competition…?  I heard a beautiful and sad story on planetary love: as people become colder with each other, as we lose more and more of our warmth and com-passion, as being cool replaces being kind, the Earth increases her temperature to compensate… Which reminds me that this year has been the hottest almost every month. Please, hug someone.

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