Leaning into the Dark

This time.  This impending darkness.  This loss.  When the light diminishes out of sight.  Grief comes creeping into my bones. I drive up my lane looking for the lush green pastures and singing Aspen trees. But all is quiet, and brown and bare.  I fight to hang onto the energy of the summer light.  Frolicking through the mountains, laying on the warm earth and this year, roaming through the pastures of the English countryside. 

In September I learned about joy, deep joy.  Sitting  in the belly of Nectar's Glen in England, feeling the energy entering me through the portals of the waterfall, I became fully aware that the place where joy enters is the place where I am deeply wounded and deeply healed.   There is a powerful intersection there. I didn't want to lose that experience.

But now, I feel it slipping away and I am left grasping, chasing, clinging to my recent joy-filled days.  I resisted the anniversary of the loss of Chloe, refusing to cry and bleed.  "I won't do that, I will only feel exuberant life and joy," I told myself over and over.  I was determined.  The refusal to honor my heart's  cry left me physically sick, without appetite and losing weight.  Mid October, I woke up on a Saturday morning and felt my heart take over.  It said, "enough."  This is the season to be with the darkness, to step into death and loss and pain. To let it be. So I allowed the longing and the absence of it all.  I cried.  

This week I leaned fully into the darkness and saw it as one of life's powerful rhythms.  That is how the light returns.  It is only in true authenticity, that joy can be present.   This time, this darkness is a gift.  Activity in the earth slows and prepares to rest.  In this darkness, this quiet period, I am also allowed to rest, to sit with the fire, to read, to write to go inside, to rest.   Today, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking tea and watching the flames dance in the stone fireplace I am at peace with Winter's gift., leaning into the arms of darkness.