Grief, Possibility, and the Precious Dark Days of the Year

It’s often at this mystical time of year that I find myself lingering in a liminal space in the early morning before I fully wake. Where dream images are within conscious reach, and where a longing rises in my heart like no other time.

These ingredients concoct a space of malleability, shape-shifting, and experimentation. It is a space where anything is possible. Where all can be undone just as easily as it can be birthed anew.

This distinctive time is thick with yearning that often lands in my body as grief, though much more complex.

It is a special flavor of grief that I only encounter in these early mornings of transitional threshold. It is a grief that knows the vastness of the stars, and the depths of the ancients. And yet understands that as I transition to the waking-world of humanness and materiality, the concrete nature of this middle-world solidifies. The malleability becomes more rigid.

It feels like my very soul somatically remembers that I am a part of the wisest Universal Love, and then I wake to the realities of this limited human world, and all that is arising in it today. A grief of deep-love and connection, a grief of separation and pain, a grief of wanting change for our Earth, wrapped into one yearning.

It is a grief I want to linger in though, because it is in this longing that another world becomes imaginable. It is a feeling that both feeds my soul’s desire here on Earth, and guides a different expression of what’s possible.

Grief holds inherent in it a vision for another possibility of the world’s expression.

Whether grief of something that didn’t come to pass, grief of how events are unfolding in the present, or anticipatory grief of a damaged and ravaged world, underneath it is a story untold. And a desire for a different outcome.

In its highest, the longing inside grief can guide us to unfold a new story. One that lives in service to what we’ve loved and continue to live for.

For grief is an expression of love and life.

This early-morning-yearning is akin to nostalgia, and a feeling that I've been familiar with my entire life. It's a yearning that's guided me to this very work I do, as I long to help people know there is more to this life than what we see.

There is a deep magic that stirs beneath and beyond. There is unseen guidance all around us. We are energies intermingling with, and informed by, the energies of the Earth and stars.

There is a more connected, meaningful, reverent way of living with these energies that's not what we've been shown. There is a more harmonious way of living with the story of our own body. There is a more generative way of engaging with each other that is respectful and life-giving.

But you know this, don't you?

At this hour, we find ourselves unraveling collectively in so many ways, yet here we are, held in the rich, loving embrace of these darkest weeks of the year. And here, the dream of possibility stirs.

We have a choice to surrender and listen to how this dream wants to move through us, or to continue to go about our busy lives. ​

These days of darkness are some of the most precious days of the entire wheel of the year.

They contain wisdom within their fabric of the necessary qualities of Life that have been tossed out by Patriarchy and Capitalism.

They are a sacred cauldron of regeneration. A space of unknowing and all-possibility. Where nothing is written for certain, and magic is real.

This space is dangerous to the powers who try to keep us from remembering our own true power, our own vast wisdom, our own voice that is deeply interwoven with the voices of the unseen world.

Because here we listen to the voices of the ancestors, to the voices of the dead, to the voices of the land, and to the voice of the future Earth, whose cry echos through our heart’s longing to grow something different than what we are seeing today.

In this darkness we can hear the yearning inside us guide us towards a new way, a new shape, of being.

In this darkness true creativity is seeded, and new worlds are born.

May you allow yourself tug at the threads of the stories we’re still collectively dreaming into being, that are long past due to be retired.

May you be undone in this liminal year’s end, so that you might reshape yourself, and your portion of our collective story, into what feels generative for you and the Earth.

May you allow yourself to following your own deep yearning towards your next right step.