Take Back The Night

The numinous has been leeched from our bones by the radioactive society we’ve created.  We worship the maudlin and horrific, the mundane and safe.  We are frightened by mystery and magic.  The ancient mystery of the Winter Solstice has departed, gone in pre-Christmas flounce and flurry.  What was most sacred is now scarcely noted, roared past as road kill.  Ritual re-sanctifies and empowers because we become the catalysts to bring forth healing and transformation.  We do not use an intermediary to ask for absolution, which puts power in their hands, not ours.  The solstice, like the equinox, are perfect moments to stand still with the Gaia.  Take stock. Participate with nature.  Re-connect to earth’s cycles.

The on-going unspeakable tragedies, some Nature’s doing, all too many man’s creation, tell us we need to re-connect, to one another, to the earth, to our own spirit.  It is time to re-invent ourselves, so that communities care for the disenfranchised, cities re-claim their homeless.  Let us be different in this long dark night, let us light the light within.

If it’s religion that feeds you, make a new space within its old traditions.  “The goal in the etymology of the word ‘religion’ is to re-link us to the Universal.” (Jessica Murray in Mt.  Astrologer) This is the same goal Yoga propounds– link our Practice to life, become a bridge, or lynch pin to expanding consciousness.  We are bits and pieces of an eco system that we need to nurture, not the other way around.  This is particularly true during dark cycles, when much of the animal and plant life are dormant.  Our dormancy often carries us toward depression, sickness, SAD, even suicide because we’ve misplaced the light within.

The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.”  We pass through the same cycles every year, we can step into the same river every day, but when we decide to do it differently, when we choose to transcend the past and take back the night, we give light to our courage, we open the great heart, that blood red muscle where we all live.